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Subject: Re: [sca-assembly] Issue 101: Complete the Conformance Section - Commentson Proposal



Anish,

Reply inline...

Yours,  Mike.

Strategist - Emerging Technologies, SCA & SDO.
Co Chair OASIS SCA Assembly TC.
IBM Hursley Park, Mail Point 146, Winchester, SO21 2JN, Great Britain.
Phone & FAX: +44-1962-818014    Mobile: +44-7802-467431  
Email:  mike_edwards@uk.ibm.com


Anish Karmarkar <Anish.Karmarkar@oracle.com> wrote on 03/03/2009 07:46:07:
> Re: [sca-assembly] Issue 101: Complete the Conformance Section -
> Comments on Proposal

> Mike Edwards wrote:
> >
> > Folks,
> >
> > Some comments on the proposal:
> >
> >
> > 1)  I think that making a series of SCA-related documents into
> > conformance points, as per section 12.1,  is unnecessary and unwise.
> >
> > The only point of making these documents into conformance points is if
> > it is intended to write testcase(s) that will validate those
> > documents.  I do not believe that we have the resources to write such
> > testcases and as a result, the conformance demands made
> > here are a waste of time and effort.
> >
>
> I would like to understand what additional tests will have to be written.
> There are already requirements on SCA runtime regarding rejecting what I
> would call non-conformant SCA documents. To test that we would have to
> create non-conformant documents, use it with a runtime and ensure that
> the runtime rejects them. What additional test artifact would have to be
> created wrt document conformance? I.e., we have a set of documents that
> we assert are non-conformant. We of course would have a set of
> conformant documents (for the positive test for a runtime).
>
> I can see us not wanting to create non-conformant (or conformant) SCA
> documents for every little feature and element/attribute that schema
> allows. But we are now talking about how detailed our test suite is
> going to be. Given that there is a requirement for runtimes to reject
> invalid SCA documents, this is already an issue. I don't think we need
> to Turing complete.
>


The tests you describe above are simply tests of an SCA runtime - and we have
these already, including "invalid documents".  However, they only check on
the valid behaviour of an SCA runtime.

If we make claims about documents themselves being valid or invalid, it is
my opinion that such claims are pretty worthless unless there are tests to
back them up.  Such tests would actually have to be able to accept some
random document and evaluate whether that document was a valid document or
not.  I even heard one person on a previous call ask for a tool of exactly
this kind.

At the moment I don't think it is worth the time and effort of building
tests that could validate documents.  As a result, I take the view that
there is little to be gained in having documents as conformance points.
The specification concentrates on what an SCA runtime does with a document
and we have the tests to check out that the runtimes are doing the right
things.

Back to answer Martin's question of whether the runtime is right or whether
the document is right when some failure occurs.  If the SCA runtime passes
our tests then the first reaction should be to say that the runtime is
right and the document is incorrect.  If this isn't the case, it actually
shows a hole in our SCA runtime tests - go plug the hole!!

 
> -Anish
> --
>
<snip>






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