Researchers of the UniTESK Lab studied UniTESK feasibility to connection-oriented protocol conformance testing. The study is based on a “minimal” connection-oriented protocol ABRACADABRA.

The study demonstrated feasibility of UniTESK to conformance testing of conection-oriented protocols. The UniTESK Lab researchers developed a formal specification of the protocol and a test scenario that performs conformance testing of ABRACADABRA implementations.

By now ISP RAS has gained significant experience in automated conformance test suites development for connectionless protocols such as IPv6, IPsec, UDP, ICMP and others. In order to extend the application domain of the UniTESK technology the researchers of the UniTESK Lab initiated a study of a “minimalistic” connection-oriented protocol ABRACADABRA that implements the major features of connection oriented protocols – connection control and repetitive sends – while omits complicated control procedures typical for advanced protocols such as TCP, RSCP, and others. ABRACADABRA protocol is a simplified connection-oriented protocol that was used to estimate Formal Description Techniques applicability to communication protocols formalization.

The study revealed that UniTESK allows automated testing of timeouts and resends – a feature that many other automated test generators lack. Comparison with other FDTs showed that UniTESK formal specification of ABRACADABRA matches the size of the specification in other FDT (Lotus, Estelle). This draws to a conclusion that UniTESK provides higher level of test development automation than other methods of model-based test generation techniques with the same level of specification coding size.

The report (in Russian) presents the ABRACADABRA protocol, its specification in C specification extension and the test suite that performs the conformance testing.