A Protocol Specification Language for Testing Implementations
Summary
When developing a system that partakes in a communication protocol,
testing whether the implementation conforms to the official specification
of that protocol is difficult: the specification may be unclear or ambiguous
and creating a simulator that automates tests is time-consuming.
The protocol specification language APSL is proposed, with which
one can describe the types of messages used in a protocol, along with a
model of the protocol’s state machine. It distinguishes itself from similar
languages by allowing the generation of message parsers and serializers,
and by providing an interaction model useful for conformance testing.
Additionally, an extensible framework is presented that can execute
automatic conformance tests in order to determine whether an implemen-
tation exhibits the behaviour expressed by an APSL specification.