Experience with the development and maintenance of large test suites specified using the
Testing and Test Control Notation (TTCN-3) has shown that it is difficult to construct tests that are concise with respect to quality aspects such as maintainability
or usability. The ISO/IEC standard 9126 defines a general software quality model that substantiates the term “quality” with
characteristics and subcharacteristics. The domain of test specifications, however, requires an adaption of this general model.
To apply it to specific languages such as TTCN-3, it needs to be instantiated. In this paper, we present an instantiation
of this model as well as an approach to assess and improve test specifications. The assessment is based on metrics and the
identification of code smells. The quality improvement is based on refactoring. Example measurements using our TTCN-3 tool
TRex demonstrate how this procedure is applied in practise.
Keywords Test specification - TTCN-3 - Quality model - Code smells - Metrics - Refactoring
B. Zeiss is supported by a Ph.D. scholarship from Siemens AG, Corporate Technology.