Fwd: Re: test case description language

All
I forwarded Mary Brady, our test development project leader the TCDL 
proposal yesterday.  The following is her comment after a quick review and 
a brief description of something that we recently started at NIST.  The 
idea here is to have a general test generator (we call test 
accelerator)  that will automatically generate tests.

Lynne


>X-Sieve: CMU Sieve 2.2
>From: "Mary Brady" <mbrady@nist.gov>
>To: <lsr@nist.gov>
>Subject: Re: test case description language
>Date: Tue, 21 Oct 2003 19:08:44 -0400
>X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2800.1158
>X-MailScanner:
>
>Hi Lynne,
>
>This type of thing is what was first developed for DOM.  It was thrown out
>in favor of something that was more DOM-specific.  Essentially, folks are
>reluctant to learn things that are different from their working environment.
>Initially, we had things like
>
><TEST NAME="xxx"  method="getElementsByTagName" value="*" >
>
>and we ended up with something like this instead:
>
><getElementsByTagName value="*">
>
>I know it's a simple example, but hopefully you see what I'm saying.  As we
>added
>more capability to the first example, it became more and more cumbersome, so
>we
>redid things to example 2, which was much more straightforward, and allowed
>us
>to generate a test suite language for DOM directly from the spec.  That's
>when we
>started pursuing automatic generation in earnest => as we tried to get to a
>minimal
>set that was necessary for a programmer to define, we realized that we could
>just
>make our code smarter and smarter.
>
>I've been working individually with each team member this week, and to date,
>what
>we are shooting for is to build a test accelerator that can handle both
>XQuery Expressions
>(new XML Query work) and one linux module (tbd) by January.  Each
>sub-project will
>find a way to create an XML Schema that represents the structure of their
>language.  The
>schema will also include calls, variables, datatypes, ranges, and
>expressions.  Carmelo
>and Sandra have been working on this for Query already, and the linux work
>had one
>already.  The user interface will read in this schema, and provide a
>mechanism to map
>the features in their specific schema to the features that the accelerator
>will support.
>Then, the user interface will dynamically perform the transformation and
>invoke the
>accelerator, which will in turn generate the tests, and provide a set of
>test assertions
>and a test matrix.  This approach provides the test writer much more
>flexibility, and
>doesn't enforce learning a new language -- you'll find as the w3c effort
>moves forward,
>that the metadata info is straight-forward, but supporting all of the
>details of each
>specificiation really mangles the language, and makes it incredibly
>cumbersome for a
>programmer to use.
>
>If you have any questions, just let me know -- I still have several more
>people to meet
>with this week, but I'll be checking e-mail in between.  I just want to give
>you a heads
>up on where we are going -- things are beginning to take shape, and I think
>it's going
>to be pretty exciting.
>
>--Mary
>
>
>----- Original Message -----
>From: <lsr@nist.gov>
>To: <mary.brady@nist.gov>
>Sent: Tuesday, October 21, 2003 5:31 PM
>Subject: test case description language
>
>
> >
> > Hi Mary
> >
> > FYI - the QAWG will be discussing a Test Case Description Lang - and will
>be
> > pursuing this over the next year.  Dave Marston wrote the original draft
>that
> > we will be discussing.
> >
> > http://www.w3.org/QA/WG/2003/10/tcdl-20031012.html
> >
> >
> > --Lynne
> >

Received on Wednesday, 22 October 2003 08:30:23 UTC