NBAP message construction using QuickCheck

Abstract: Traffic and Feature SW is a department based in Kista. At this department the main processor software, or MPSW in short, in Ericssons Radio Base Stations is tested prior to integration of new releases. Traffic and Feature SW, also called MPSW in this thesis, works closely with another department of Ericsson called RBS System I&V which tests the same software but for complete RBS nodes. MPSW uses black- and greybox scripted testing in regression suites that are executed on a daily basis. These regression suites are separated into different subsets of functionality that maps to the capabilities of the Radio Base Station software. The authors of this thesis has performed an implementation of automated test cases for a subset of the Radio Base Station software using an automated software tool called QuickCheck. These test cases were successfully integrated into the test framework and were able to find several issues with the main processor software and its subsystems in the Radio Base Station. The commissioner of this thesis have plans to further integrate the QuickCheck tool into the test framework, possibly automating test cases for several subsets of the Radio Base Station software. The authors have therefore analysed and put forth metrics that compares the testing of the Radio Base Station software using QuickCheck with the conventional regression test cases. These metrics covers areas such as the cost related to and the inherent capabilities of QuickCheck. The evaluation of these metrics was performed by the authors to give the commissioner decisive information. These evaluations showed that QuickCheck was able to generate complex message stuctures in complex sequences. QuickCheck was also able to shrink both the content of these messages and the length of the sequences of messages to be able to provide a minimal counterexample when a fault was discovered. The only metric that QuickCheck failed to support was to inherit functionality to support the handling of statistics from executions.