Component interface specification in architecture description languages for behavioral validation

ASML is a company that designs, develops and produces photolithography machines, called wafer scanners, used in the process of manufacturing chips and integrated circuits. Wafer scanners are controlled by the ultra-sized TWINSCAN software, whose architecture is described in an Architecture Description Language (ADL). An ADL is a computer language describing the software architecture of a system on a certain level of abstraction. Besides the static structure of the software (i.e., software components and their interfaces through which they communicate) there are several characteristics that have to be ensured during run-time such as performance aspects and expected dynamic behavior of interfaces and components. The description of the last one can be further used for several purposes during different phases of the software design and development process. This report presents an approach to extend the ASML ADL with be havioral description of interfaces. Further, those descriptions are used in generating mocks as test-doubles applied in testing software components. The languages and the tools that were created and integrated within an ASML testing environment have been used in real test-cases. The proposed approach demonstrates that using models of dynamic behavior of interfaces reduces the effort of writing test code, and moreover it enables validating of a run-time trace against a class of valid traces contained within the behavioral description.