Conformance testing and specification management
James A. St Pierre, Kevin G. Brady, Selden Stewart · 1996
The final report for the second year of a joint project between the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and SEMATECH follows our previous report [1] and elaborates on two areas:• Conformance Testing • Specification ManagementThe growing acceptance of Java, an object-oriented programming language, makes it feasible to consider testing across heterogeneous computer platforms, as well as remotely across a network.The use of Java and the Object Management Group's Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) for developing a conformance testing environment is only one way that SEMATECH member companies may benefit from this distributed object paradigm.Although there are still technical issues, such as, performance and security, the trend towards adoption by the industry is currently the biggest advantage that Java has over other object-oriented languages.We recommend that SEMATECH continue to explore automatic test generation techniques.This is apart from the proposal for Java-based testing but would be complementary and should be done in conjunction with Java-based testing.The Internet has long been used in the computer research community for exchanging documents, specifications, and computer software.More recently, the development of Hypertext Transfer Protocol and the Hypertext Markup Language have created the World-Wide Web.We feel that it is more important than ever to consider the adoption of HTML as a standard publication format, and even as an exchange and working format.This can be done with conventional word processing tools with HTML capability or with specialized HTML-based tools.The reorientation to Web publication and HTML will require some reorganization of the Specification text.year's report, we never mentioned Java because we had not anticipated how quickly it would become widely available.Now, we discuss the application of this new technology to conformance testing of the CIM Framework.We made a case for single-source specification management last year.This means that the CIM Framework Specification is maintained in a single-source format from which all the necessary distribution forms can be derived as automatically as possible.When paper publication was the only distribution form, the only issue was version control as changes were made to the document.Now documents must be distributed in paper, on the World-Wide Web, and the formal specification portions must be suitable for object request brokers (ORB's).We discussed the role that Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) might play in this process.However, this last year has seen remarkable growth in this Internettechnology.In this report we update our recommendations to track those changes.The World-Wide Web, also known as WWW or simply just, the "Web," has taken a central role in our work.It is the infrastructure that makes electronic publication of documents like the SEMATECH CIM Framework Specificationpractical.Oneof the consequences of this rapid change to Internet-based technology is that the references in this paper include universal resource locators (URL's), the keys to finding information on the Web.This paper can be found at http://www.cme.nist.gov/msid/pubs/stew96b/ in its HTML version.Two other significant technologies in our work are also based on the Internet and converging with the Web: the Java programming language and object request brokers (ORB's).