Requirements: Clarification of Use Cases

[stephen.green@systml.co.uk]

I was asked to clarify the use cases behind some of
the requirements I recently proposed for TaMIE
deliverables.

I'll list a few examples in no particular order.

A.
Sensitivity to changes in message structure, message semantics
and business process/protocol definition artefacts - perhaps
changes triggering events which affect testing and monitoring
in some way (such as to say that outcomes are no longer valid
or evaluations must be updated in a predetermined way).

Business Process/Protocol changes
1. use case: a time to perform attribute in a business process
definition is increased to cater for increases in latency during
a holiday period
either (not necessarily in conformance to best practices):
a. a process definition version is updated and a CPPA is
    correspondingly updated to include the new process and the
    a the message header change occurs to include the new CPPA
    service ID
b. a process definition timestamp changes and yet no change is
    made to the CPPA or message so an exception might have to
    be thrown to say that we no can no longer assume that the
    originally known time to perform, etc still apply

2. use case: as for 1, above, but after the holiday period the
    time to perform is somehow reverted back to original value

Message structure/semantics changes
3. use case: the value of tax legally applicable in a business
    document (such as sales tax in an invoice) changes due to a
    change in the law
Either
a. the code used in the tax entity of the document stays the same
    and the semantics of the code as defined not in the schema but
    in an adjunct codelist document (such as genericode) changes
    and this is visible to the monitoring by the change in either
    the timestamp of the codelist document and/or the version ID
    part of a process definition external document definition
    reference ID. The validation of the document then is required
    to change since verification of tax calculation is made part
    of the validation of the document as a predicate to the type
    of response document
b. the validation of the document is again required to change but
    this time due to the inclusion of a new code previously invalid
    but now valid. This code is added to a (genericode, say) file
    of valid codes which is used during validation of the document
    but either the file timestamp or 'last modified' date changes
    or the version ID changes. In either case there is an event to
    indicate that previous tests or codes are no longer valid.

There are many variations possible in the details of these use cases,
such as how monitoring would have to adapt to changes, if at all,
and what would be required to happen when a change event occurs.
If schemas are updated then it might be a requirement a) that the
new schema be used in validation or b) that monitoring stop or tests
be invalid until manual changes of schema used for validation are
made. If schemas are the same but adjunct files like codelists or
business process definitions are changed then it may be unrealistic
to expect that such complex and unpredictable changes could be catered
for without re-generating or perhaps re-authoring the test suite but
it might still be necessary to have an event occur and be responded
to which indicates that testing might no longer be valid and human
intervention is required.

Other areas where there might need to be senstivity to changes in
definition artefacts:

mapping requirements between one document syntax and another

change of version of definition syntax itself (e.g. XML Schema 1.0
changed to XML Schema 1.1 without change to document structure,
use of XML 1.1 rather than 1.0, BPSS 1.0 definition upgraded to
ebBP 2.0 without a change to business process)

change of version of ebMS header without changes to CPPA definitions

Would such changes require that testing be updated? What events
would be appropriate if there is such a change during ongoing monitoring?

Maybe I'm way off target with all this - these are just early thoughts.



-- 
Stephen D. Green

Partner
SystML, http://www.systml.co.uk
Tel: +44 (0) 117 9541606

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=matthew+22:37 .. and voice