Our Test and Evaluation Webinar from a few weeks ago generated many great questions, and we wanted to share the response with you:
 |
Caught the webinar this AM as well as the related blog. The UML Testing Profile and the ISO 29119 standards are really important on the international test engineering front. Your CORE test lexicon and methods are not conformant. Your lexicon is clearly influenced by, what I will suggest are, outdated US DoD MilStds and DIDs. Aren’t you worried that being behind the As Is state in international test engineering practices negatively impacts your sales? Interoperability via technology-oriented solutions is really important to many customers. Solutions compliant to the OSLC collection of standards are being released quite frequently and some of the capabilities provided are game changers. CORE doesn’t sound like it is capable of playing in the OSLC game. Am I wrong that CORE is relying on CSV files to move things around? That solution seems dated and mandraulic. Maybe I’m missing something which I why I am contacting you directly. Thank you, “Eric” |
Dear Eric,
Thank you for your recent question regarding the Test and Evaluation Webinar broadcast.
The UML Testing Profile and ISO 29119 are two important standards for the testing community. These standards provide detail guidance for actual performance of software testing.
However, CORE is a systems engineering and systems management toolset. This point was not highlighted sufficiently in the presentation. CORE is not intended to be a specific software testing toolset and therefore is not tailored specifically for either of these two standards. The Verification Facility and configuration in CORE is meant to support the systems engineer such that the SE can manage and understand what is going to be done to verify the system design.
The SE and Test and Evaluation (T&E) subject matter experts should work together to develop verification requirements, organize verification events, and determine testing configurations and testing organizations. In any system design effort, the SE team has an obligation to manage the verification of the system, to understand what it will take to perform the necessary verification. The T&E team has the responsibility to complete the verification; to determine and manage the how of the testing program. That is where the specific processes in UML Testing Profile and ISO 29119 come into the picture.
In this perspective then, the organization of the verification elements in CORE represents the transition from the system development team to the test team. CORE provides for the traceability from the system requirements and functions to the verification requirements and then into the test program that will be used to verify system performance. The intent is that the test and evaluation has the information to complete the testing using their test standards.
Moreover, when a test fails, the T&E and Systems team can trace the failure all the way back into the system design to determine the change needed in the system design.
Additionally, the schema of CORE is very flexible. Many of our customers have aliased the names on the classes and extended the schema to align with their internal or industry processes. By modifying the schema you can align CORE to match up with the lexicon of the UML Testing Profile or the ISO 29119 standard.
In regards to the ability to interface with other toolsets, CORE has the ability to interface through the CORE API and through the ability to export and import .csv files. You are correct when you mention that CORE does not have the ability to interface through the OSLC standard. However, our GENESYS product line has a different underlying architecture and uses the same schema as CORE. We are researching the ability of interfacing with other products using OSLC.
Regards,
Ron Kratzke
Principal Systems Engineer
Vitech Corporation
