Fwd: Dealing with spec versions in TAs (and metadata)

["Stephen Green" <stephen.green@documentengineeringservices.com>]

Forwarded for Paul who owns this AI

Thanks David

Steve


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From:  <david_marston@us.ibm.com>
Date: 2008/7/15
Subject: Dealing with spec versions in TAs (and metadata)
To: tag-comment@lists.oasis-open.org
Cc: "Durand, Jacques R." <JDurand@us.fujitsu.com>,
stephen.green@documentengineeringservices.com



I see in Stephen's latest missive ("Editorial Memo: Multiple
specifications, etc") that you want better text about versions and how
to handle multiple versions in the TAs. Please recall my email to the
comment list dated 5 March 2008. I brought to your attention a
mechanism we (OASIS XSLT testing TC) defined for test case metadata
that could apply equally well to test assertions.

>3. There is a placeholder for "Identifying Versions" in 3.2. I think the first paragraph should point out that while a spec document is produced anew for each version, that does not require that a set of TAs be produced anew. The TAs can cross several spec versions as long as they have the proper version data.

>Back when I was working on the OASIS TC on XSLT conformance testing, we devised two separate values:
VersionAdd: the lowest numerical version to which the test applies.
(Absence of this value implies the default of 1.0)
VersionDrop: if present, it is a number higher than VersionAdd (or
1.0) and indicates the lowest version number to which the test does
NOT apply. Numbering it this way allows a version like 2.3 to be
issued after 3.0 without disturbing cases that no longer apply as of
3.0. If we had instead used the highest-number version to which it
does apply, in this example we might have given the value 2.2 to those
cases that would not apply to 3.0, but the cases may well have applied
to 2.3, when 2.3 was issued.

I hope that helps you resolve the issue.
.................David Marston


-- 
Stephen D. Green

Partner
SystML, http://www.systml.co.uk
Tel: +44 (0) 117 9541606
Associate Director
Document Engineering Services
http://www.documentengineeringservices.com

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