Testing Telecoms Software with Quviq QuickCheck

Testing Telecoms Software with Quviq QuickCheck by John Hughes, Thomas Arts, Joakim Johansson, Ulf Wiger.

We present a case study in which a novel testing tool, Quviq QuickCheck, is used to test an industrial implementation of the Megaco protocol. We considered positive and negative testing and we used our developed specification to test an old version in order to estimate how useful QuickCheck could potentially be when used early in development.The results of the case study indicate that, by using Quviq QuickCheck, we would have been able to detect faults early in the development.We detected faults that had not been detected by other testing techniques. We found unclarities in the specifications and potential faults when the software is used in a different setting. The results are considered promising enough to Ericsson that they are investing in an even larger case study, this time from the beginning of the development of a new product.

That's right, the illustrious John Hughes is dropping out of school to do an Erlang startup!

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Erlang vs. Haskell

It's interesting to see it argued that Erlang is more suited for this work than Haskell.

Hmm

Having just looked over the paper, it seems like they argue that Erlang was more appropriate chiefly because it was the language used to write the system they were testing.

applicability to asynchronous protocol testing?

this paper raises the question how this technique is applicable to asynchronous system properties.

bugs in the asynchronous flow of current telecommunication systems survive long into the lifetime of released systems. conventional test efforts are obviously insufficient to guarantee stability due to the exponential complexity in regards to system size.

in my experience this is the achilles heel of telecommunication systems, and where automated test generation could provide an entirely new opportunity.

does anyone know of similar publications in this direction, or maybe more generally in the field of automated testing of distributed systems?

Maybe this is of interest

I just happened to have the fortunate chance to see John re-giving his talk, so I wrote a short summary. Maybe this is of interest to LtU-readers who didn't find the time to read the full paper...