• Journal of KIISE:Computing Practices and Letters
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.135-149
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• 2000

Most of prior works on testing parallel programs have concentrated on how to guarantee the reproducibility by employing event traces exercised during executions of a program. Consequently, little work has been done to generate test cases, especially, from specifications produced from software development process. In this research work, we devise the techniques for deriving test cases automatically from the specifications written in Message Sequence Charts(MSCs) which are widely used in telecommunication areas and develop the testing environment for performing module testing of parallel programs with derived test cases. For deriving test cases from MSCs, we have to uncover the causality relations among events embedded implicitly in MSCs. For this, we devise the methods for adapting vector time stamping to MSCs, Then, valid event sequences, satisfying the causality relations, are generated and these are used as test cases. The generated test cases, written in TTCN, are translated into CHILL source codes, which interact with a target module to be tested and test the validity of behaviors of the module. Since the testing method developed in this research work extracts test cases from the MSC specifications produced front telecommunications software development process, it is not necessary to describe auxiliary specifications for testing. In audition adapting vector time stamping generates automatically the event sequences, the generated event sequences that are ones for whole system can be used for individual testing purpose.