Fwd: Upcoming Testing activity at W3C

Dear all,
as you can see from the FWDed message below, W3C is planning to start an
activity around testing. We have discussed the importance of testing in  
several occasions, so I thought it was good to inform all the IG  
participants about this initiative.

At the moment the activity is under review of W3C Members.
Once it get started we could (if there is enough interest in this group)  
provide input to the new groups from a Web & TV perspective.

For example I personally think would be interesting to collect feedback  
 from companies and other groups (outside W3C) about testing of web  
technologies in their products/specifications, to know what are the  
currently followed approaches, which kind of problems or limitations have  
been found and any suggestion in order to make the work done from the W3C  
useful for different scenarios.

Regards,
/g


------- Forwarded message -------
From: "Francois Daoust" <fd@w3.org>
To: member-web-and-tv@w3.org
Cc:
Subject: Upcoming Testing activity at W3C
Date: Tue, 26 Jul 2011 23:16:25 +0200

Hi participants of the Web and TV IG,

[...]

Testing was one of the topics discussed during the Berlin Web and TV
workshop. As you may know, W3C has been testing technologies in various
Working Groups, each working group following its own methods for building
a test suite that can serve to assess whether the entrance criteria to
publish a specification as a final W3C (Proposed) Recommendation are met.
There have successful efforts to coordinate testing efforts in the past,
e.g. in the Mobile Web Test Suites Working Group, but Working Groups have
hardly been coordinating on testing up until now.

This leads to a situation where:
- test suites use different formats and reporting methods, making it hard
to test support of different specifications in a consistent way for a
given user agent
- test suites run in specific environments and can hardly be re-used
elsewhere (e.g. to test mobile or TV devices).
- test cases cannot be easily extracted to match other organization needs,
for instance for certification purpose.

The Web Testing Activity is meant to address these shortcomins.
http://www.w3.org/2011/05/activity-proposal.html

[...]

The goal is to create:

1. a Web Testing Interest Group to develop and deploy testing mechanisms
and collateral materials for testing of Web technologies. Draft charter
available at:
      http://www.w3.org/2011/05/testing-ig-charter

2. a Browser Testing and Tools Working Group to standardize a Web Driver
API (to allow automated simulation of user actions, such as clicking
links, entering text, and submitting forms) and a Console API (to allow
Web developers to programatically write messages and data to a
developer-tools console component). Draft charter available at:
      http://www.w3.org/2011/08/browser-testing-charter

I believe the scope of the Interest Group would cover some of the needs
expressed by participants of the Berlin Web and TV workshop, so I'd like
to encourage Web and TV IG participants to review and consider joining
this activity once created to ensure that potential TV specific needs get
taken into account by the Web Testing IG (e.g. to ensure that a test
runner compatible with TV sets gets developed).

Thanks,
Francois.


-- 
Giuseppe Pascale
TV & Connected Devices
Opera Software - Sweden

Received on Wednesday, 27 July 2011 16:14:32 UTC