The major new capabilities of TTCN-3 compared to TTCN-2 are:
- different presentation formats (e.g. tabular and MSC presentation formats),
- dynamic concurrent testing configurations,
- operations for synchronous and asynchronous communications,
- ability to specify encoding information and other attributes (including user extensibility),
- data and signature templates with powerful matching mechanisms,
- type and value parameterization,
- assignment and handling of test verdicts,
- test suite parameterization and test case selection mechanisms, and
- combined use of TTCN-3 and ASN.1, IDL, and XML.
There is available a very good comparison of TTCN-2 and TTCN-3 by Claude Desroches.
TTCN-2 is an outdated technology replaced by more advanced TTCN-3 testing technology. There are still organisations that have huge amount of legacy TTCN-2 test suites from the past. Those legacy TTCN-2 test suites keep those companies stuck in TTCN-2 legue and prevent them to enjoy the benefits of TTCN-3.
Migrating from TTCN-2 to TTCN-3 can be done almost automatically as explained by Thomas Deiss.
There are commercial services and tools available for helping users to migrate the legacy TTCN-2 test suites to TTCN-3:
- Elvior TTCN-2 to TTCN-3 migration tool and services
- Testing Technologies TTtwo2three tool
- IBM t2tot3 tool
