a.thackrah@opengroup.org
j.deraeve@opengroup.org
The Open Group
Apex Plaza
Forbury Road
Reading
Berkshire RG1 1AX
England
Our Experience
The Open Group exists to support the promotion and adoption of open systems and standards. We have worked for many years in support of these goals and have a great deal of experience in supporting companies, forums and consortia in seeing systems developed from standards through testing to certification and market adoption.The Open Group manages programs in a range of industry sectors (Wireless,
mobile, security, directory) to promote open standards in these emerging
technologies. The company provides Testing and Certification services to
members, and others in support of these programs.
We have experience of online conformance testing of XML-based user agents.
The VSWAP
test suite is used by the WAP Forum in its client certifcation program
which is run, on its behalf by The Open Group. The test suite covers all
aspects of WAP-enabled user agent behaviour - micro-browser conformance.
We have developed tests based on W3C specifications.
The VSWAP
and VSNETCOM
test suites include tests for HTTP 1.0/1.1 and HTML 3.2. We also have test
suites using IETF specifications such as VSLDAP - an LDAP directory server
test suite that has been designed to support the certification program
of the Directory Interoperability Forum, managed by The Open Group.
We have established conformance testing methodologies.
For web-based
systems, Unix/POSIX
and real
time platforms, for API testing (ADL)
and we provide products and services
to support standalone and distributed testing.
We are a leading provider of certification and product branding services.
We own and actively manage the Unix and other brands and we provide certification
services to groups such as the WAP Forum
and the Directory Interoperability
Forum.
Company Needs
We wish to extend our conformance testing and certification services
to meet the challenge of the emerging XML-based systems (Mobile, wireless,
B2B, protocols, &c)
We wish to discuss the issues of testing XML-based systems (particularly
at the semantic level) with like-minded groups.
Expectations of the Workshop
The big challenge for QA of XML-based systems is not in the validation
of DTD/schema but in the characterisation of conformance requirements at
the semantic level. XML is being used for file formats, object encapsulation
and in protocol exchanges (both as payload and envelope).
It is on the ability of XML systems to work correctly at the organisation-to-organisation level that the reputation of XML rests and so it is vital that we understand the conformance issues. We hope to further discussion and awareness of these topics.
Our Contribution
By discussing our existing strategies, products and services we can help to provide a view of the `state of the art' in conformance, certification and interoperability testing. In particular we can foster awareness of the differences between these three types of testing as this is essential to successful QA.
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Our work with mobile client testing is leading us towards the development
of tests for modularized XHTML. We now have considerable experience in
managing testing and certification programs in this field.
The Open Group is planning a new generation of tools to test XML-based
systems at the semantic level. We see XHTML as a suitable system on which
to focus our development efforts.
We wish to explore ways in which we can avoid duplication of effort
in common work on emerging W3C standards (which are likely to incorporated
into many future systems).
We would like promote discussion on the importance of semantic (scenario)
testing to the future of XML.
XML is being used in
various ways, for example...
- user agents in client/server system.
- multi-client/server system with XML protocols.
- consumer/producer system
- `peer networks'