A Message Viewing System for a Multi Tool Software Conformance Testing Environment

The introduction of open standards in telecommunications has resulted in a rapid expansion in services by allowing different vendors to produce equipment that can interwork successfully. However to ensure that a product adheres to an open systems specification a series of tests, called conformance tests, must be performed. Faults occurring at this stage are expensive to correct and therefore techniques which can reduce the work involved in error location and correction are beneficial. Visualisation, which represents the operation of a real-time system in a graphical manner, is one such technique for quickly locating faults. This paper presents a visualisation system based on the Message Viewing System (MVS). The MVS is responsible for collecting messages from the various software tools in the conformance testing environment and displaying these messages in a graphical manner, which is independent of the software tools used in the conformance testing environment. Thus this paper presents an advanced visualisation system for a dynamic real time conformance testing system. The visualisation system was tested and shown to work satisfactorily in a GSM/DCS1800 conformance testing environment using two different types of software tools.