A formal approach to conformance testing

In order to assure successful communication between computer systems from different manufacturers, standardized communication protocols are being developed and specified. As a next step implementations of these protocols are needed that conform to these specifications. Testing is a way to check correctness of protocol implementations with respect to their specifications. This activity is known as protocol conformance testing. This thesis deals with a formal approach to protocol conformance testing. Testing is performed based on a formal specification of the protocol. The final aim is to obtain methods for the (automatic) derivation of useful sets of tests from formal specifications. The derived tests should be provably correct, which means that they should not detect errors in correct implementations. Moreover, the derived tests should be meaningful: erroneous implementations should be detected with a high probability. An important aspect is a formal definition of what constitutes correctness, i.e. when does a protocol implementation conform to a protocol specification.