Automatic Black-Box Testing of GSM Traffic in a Simulated Environment

Testing has its obvious place in any software development project cycle and is the most important technique to verify correctness of software implementations. This Master’s thesis will explain several techniques used today to test software systems, followed by a presentation of how an automatic test generator ordered by Ericsson Radio Systems has been designed and implemented as a part of this Master’s thesis. This generator uses black-box testing to generate random test sequences containing GSM messages that can be executed in a simulated lab environment. The aim of the software is to test parts of a program used in Ericsson’s base stations by verifying that different GSM services work as intended and can be combined. A similar product has previously been a part of the company’s program portfolio but has due to several reasons not been used the last few years. One of the main issues was that the memory complexity grew exponentially relative the test size, which resulted in that new services could not be tested due to memory overload in the terminals where the test sequences were generated. Another issue was the lack of a good syntax to specify the services to be tested and dependencies between them to the generator. I have in this thesis project designed and implemented a generator that with blackbox testing generates valid GSM messages that can be executed in Ericsson Radio System’s lab environment. This product has been developed from scratch and eliminates all problems experienced with previous versions of the software. The key to the solution has been to design a new language to specify GSM services and dependencies between these services; an approach that automatically suggested an elegant solution to reduce the memory complexity to a constant. Automatisk funktionstestning av GSM-trafik i en simulerad miljö