Re: [tag] Draft write-up for Anatomy of a TA section

[Kevin Looney <Kevin.T.Looney@Sun.COM>]

Hi Jacques (et. al).

     I just wanted to quickly comment on something I liked.  On page 3, 
while discussing example TA-102, there is a notion of  "pre-requisite" 
test assertions.

     Capturing the assertion pre-requisites (and thus, dependency 
relationships) looks like it could be very important and practical.  For 
Java conformance testing, we have large (10-40k test) test suites. 
 Running these can take significant time.  Pruning unnecessary tests (to 
reduce testing cost) becomes an important usability factor for these 
test-suites.   A testing harness that can delete trees of unnecessary 
tests (due to pre-requisites failing) would be very useful in this scenario.

      From the perspective of specification analysis, identifying a Test 
Assertion (by distilling normative text into it's most atomic behavioral 
description) can be problematic if "the context" of the TA is removed. 
 Specifying the pre-requisite assertion is a step in the right direction 
here.

Thanks,
Kevin L

Durand, Jacques R. wrote:

> Authored by Serm and myself, although Serm has not seen this latest 
> version as he is traveling right now.
> For comments.
>  
> -Jacques