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Subject: Question regarding TAG and TAML
Dear All, As far as I understand Test Assertions are meant to kind of formalise Normative Statements in the specifications which is superb. I couldn’t find a description for Test Assertion Mark-up Language in its spec but I reckon it provides a XML representation of the Test Assertions. However, I don’t quite get the point of a machine readable representation when the predicates are not formal. For example in the following, which is the only example I could find in the TAML spec: TA id: widget-TA104-2 Normative Source: specification requirement 104 Target: widget Predicate: [the widget] is from 5 to 15 centimeters long in its longer dimension. Prescription Level: mandatory Tag: normative_property = medium-sized And the XML representation: <testAssertion id="widget-TA104-2"> . . . <predicate> [the widget] is from LENGTH-A to LENGTH-B long in its longer dimension</predicate> . . . <tag name="DefinesNormativeProperty">true</tag> <tag name="NormativeProperty">medium-sized</tag> </testAssertion> To me it is still the same thing with not that much added semantic to the first representation and is readable but not understandable by machines. Consider the following example from ebBP v2.0.4: “The specific roles (e.g. buyer, seller) MUST be specified at the Business Transaction Activity level, when the Business Transaction definition is used for a distinct purpose.” I am not an expert in writing TAs but I would write something like this: TA id: ebBP-xxx Normative Source: specification requirement 729 (the line number of the sentence for your reference) Target: Role Predicate: [the Role] is (?) specified at the Business Transaction Activity level, when the Business Transaction definition is used for a distinct purpose. Prescription Level: mandatory I am not sure if the way I wrote it is correct, but if it is, the predicate doesn’t add much to the textual information in the spec and I believe it is not easily measurable which contradicts the aim of TAs as far as I understand. My understanding is that the XML representation would not add that much to it either. Having said all these I am a bit struggling with the notion of Test Assertions and their XML representation and am not sure how they can help in measuring the conformance of an implementation to a spec or maybe even how the mark-up can help in writing test cases. I have to say I do agree that XML representation of Test Assertions could be very helpful, but if they have some logic base to make them machine understandable as opposed to only readable. I would appreciate if you could shed some light on the matter. Best regards Bahareh =================== Bahareh R. Heravi PhD Researcher Department of Information Systems & Computing Brunel University Uxbridge, Middlesex, London, UB8 3PH, United Kingdom. Web: http://people.brunel.ac.uk/~cspgbrh
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