Test Assertions for Normative Statements in the ebBP v2.0.4 spec

[Bahareh Heravi <Bahareh.Heravi@brunel.ac.uk>]

Dear All,

 

I am trying to define some Test Assertions for the ebBP v2.0.4 spec. However, in some cases it doesn’t seem possible for me to do so. I have found quite a lot of Normative Statements, which I couldn’t define a TA for. A number of such normative statements are as follows:

P. 29
A document referenced by an include element MUST be inserted before schema or DTD validation is attempted.

P. 47
If specified, the content of the receipt and the legibility of a business message (if required) MUST be reviewed prior to the processing of the Requesting or Responding Business Document or the evaluation of condition expressions in the message's Business Documents or Document Envelope.

P. 49
However, to achieve this result (state alignment), the Business Transaction protocol MUST be implemented on top of a reliable messaging service that provides guaranteed message delivery at the transport level.

P. 57
When multiple activities are nested within ComplexBTA, these activities MUST be executed in series.

P. 60
Whether BeginsWhen, EndsWhen, or Pre- or PostCondition, the information MUST be visible to the parties involved.

P. 69
The Business Transaction is an atomic unit of work. All of the interactions in a Business Transaction MUST succeed or each party MUST revert their state to the state prior to the start of the BTA.

 

A ReceiptAcknowledgement (if required) MUST always occur before an AcceptanceAcknowledgement (if required), and an AcceptanceAcknowledgement MUST always occur before a Response (if required).

P. 76
A timeout parameter MUST be specified whenever a Requesting or Responding party expects Business Signals in return to the Business Document Request or Response. A Requesting party MUST NOT remain in an infinite wait state.

P. 77
A Receipt Exception signals an error condition in the management of a Business Transaction. This Business Signal is returned to the initiating activity that originated the request. This exception MUST terminate the Business Transaction.

 

I can imagine of defining some TAs which are not that close to the test case and are not based on any meta-model, which I don’t think would be of much use. An example would be something like the following:

 

 

TA id: ebBP-P47

Normative Source: specification requirement zzz

Target: business message

Predicate: content of the receipt and the legibility (perhaps to be defined in another TA) [of a Business Message] to be reviewed prior to the processing of the Requesting or Responding Business Document or the evaluation of condition expressions in the message's Business Documents or Document Envelope.

Prescription Level: mandatory

This doesn’t seem much useful to me and is not that much more formal than the text in the spec. I understand that I have probably not defined it exactly the way I should have, but still I don’t think this normative statement could be formalised in an appropriate way and based on a defined meta-model.

 

I would appreciate if you could let me know the way you would define TAs for the above normative statements. Or perhaps TAs could be only used for certain types of normative statements?

 

Many thanks and Best regards

Bahareh

 

----------------------------------------------------

Bahareh R. Heravi

Doctoral Researcher

Department of Information Systems & Computing

Brunel University

Uxbridge, Middlesex, London, UB8 3PH, United Kingdom.

Web: http://people.brunel.ac.uk/~cspgbrh