- From: Liam Quin <liam@w3.org>
- Date: Fri, 12 Aug 2005 20:13:59 -0400
- To: Per Bothner <per@bothner.com>
- Cc: Andrew Eisenberg <andrew.eisenberg@us.ibm.com>, www-ql@w3.org
On Thu, Aug 11, 2005 at 11:47:14PM -0700, Per Bothner wrote: > I welcome and appreciate this test suit. However, I'm missing a > rationale for the way it is laid out and how tests are written. Per, and others... I don't speak for the testing task force who made the test suite here, but since they may mostly be on vacation, I'll take the time to note that the test suite's goal is, strictly speaking, to test whether the specification can be implemented. It's not a conformance test -- an implementation that passes all the tests it's supposed to test might be conformant, but the test suite doesn't prove it one way or the other. On the other hand, if we can compare the results from a group of implementations, we can get an idea if there are features in the specification that are not widely implemented, or where there might be interoperability problems. As at IETF (for example), a W3C spec must show at least two interoperable implementations of each feature before it can reasonably become a Recommendation. So the test cases aren't written in the eXtreme or agile programming sense of identifying bugs, but rather to give coverage of the specification, and this different goal leads to a different approach. I hope this helps -- of course, it's also possible that the published test suite might be changed to make it easier to submit new entries, as long as the new test cases are tied back to the specification. best, Liam -- Liam Quin, W3C XML Activity Lead, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ http://www.holoweb.net/~liam/ Pictures from old books searched with XML Query: http://fromoldbooks.org/Search/
Received on Saturday, 13 August 2005 00:14:06 UTC