A workload generation method for TTCN-3 performance testing

TTCN-3 (Testing and Test Control Notation version 3) is a test specification and implementation language to define test procedures for black-box testing. As TTCN-3 has been widely accepted and applied in many fields of testing, the demand of using TTCN-3 in performance testing is emerged and increased rapidly. In performance testing, how to define and generate workload is an important issue. However, because of TTCN-3 language's insufficient support, testers usually need to make a great effort to manually write workload generation code in TTCN-3. This paper proposes a model-driven method to facilitate workload generation in TTCN-3 performance test. According to the method, the LQM (Load Quantity Model) is used to character the workload quantities and the constraints between the quantities, while the LPM (Load Profile Model) could define the value of each quantity and its changes with respect to time. This paper also presents a series of algorithm to automate the transformation from the model to the TTCN-3 test system. Finally, together with a set of control points the authors designed in this paper, the TTCN-3 test system could be executed in order to generate the expected workload. A case is used to demonstrate the capability of the method and validate the accuracy of the generated workload.