THE BENEFITS OF STATIC COMPLIANCE TESTING FOR SCA NEXT
James Ezick, Jonathan Springer · 2011
The next generation of the Software Communications Architecture (SCA) specification (SCA Next) introduces several features that will affect the compliance certification process. Among the more significant and high-profile changes are the introduction of multiple supported platform models and support for both CORBA and non-CORBA transport layers. These features, which further abstract the specification away from a uniform hardware/software interface, make constructing an all-purpose dynamic testing platform more difficult. This suggests that a certification plan that relies more heavily on static testing might provide a more versatile and cost-effective approach. In this paper, we describe the benefits and implications of static compliance testing in the context of SCA Next. This includes a discussion of which requirements are and are not amenable to static testing, the complexity of defining and customizing tests, the expected performance and limitations of those tests, and a summary of our experiences from the development of R-Check™ SCA, our platform for static SCA 2.2.2 compliance testing.