An introduction to the testing and test control notation (TTCN-3)

The testing and test control notation (TTCN-3) is a new test specification and test implementation language that supports all kinds of black-box testing of distributed systems. TTCN-3 was developed in the years 1999 to 2002 at the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), as a redesign of the tree and tabular combined notation (TTCN) standard (ITU-T Rec. X.292). TTCN-3 is built from a textual core language that provides interfaces to different data description languages and the possibility of different presentation formats. This makes TTCN-3 quite universal and application independent. TTCN-3 is being published as the ITU-T Rec. Z.140 series. This paper provides an introduction to TTCN-3. This includes an overall view of the TTCN-3 core language, a description of the existing presentation formats, an explanation of the implementation of TTCN-3-based test systems and a discussion about the current usage and the future of the language. The authors all participated in the work within ETSI.