[news.eclipse.tools.hyades] Test Model subgroup meeting notes, 27 - Feb

[jptoomey@xxxxxxxxxx]

Test Model Subgroup Meeting Minutes: 27-Feb-2003

Hierarchy of Parts:
* After some deliberation, Part Hierarchy Option #1 was chosen as 
  the solution for representing a hierarchy of parts in the Test 
  model.  The subParts relationship was changed to an aggregation 
  by value.

Location
* It was agreed that in the first cut of the model, we would not 
  include subclasses of the Location class (such as MachineCluster,
  Machine, Processor, etc.)  We also agreed, however, that it may 
  be necessary to clarify the specializations of Location in order 
  to support test interop, and we plan to revisit the 
  specializations of Location in the future. 
* We added a self-aggregation by reference to Location to generically
  allow for grouping of Locations into a Location.

Role of UML and U2TP in the Hyades Test Model
* We had a long and contentious debate about the relationship between
  the Hyades Test Model, the UML 2 Testing Profile and UML in 
  general.  Serge expressed concern that we were making decisions
  that resulted in our model being incompatible with the U2TP. 
  There was also disagreement on whether non-behavioral classes
  (such as TestCase and TestSuite) should explicitly extend UML 
  classes (1.4 or otherwise.)  The resolutions to these issues were:
  (thanks to Serge for writing it up)

We agreed that a right approach to align the Hyades model to the U2TP 
profile was the following:
* The U2TP profile is considered as an external independent model on 
  top of which Hyades will build its specific concept space. The U2TP 
  model will be extended with only associations to the Hyades concept 
  space,
* One of the goals of Hyades is to provide feedback to the OMG/U2TP 
  group about potential implementatability issues of the U2TP model,
* None of those models will be directly mapped to UML concepts: The 
  Hyades model should be informational.

* For the purpose of the implementation of this model into executable 
  tests, Hyades will map its concepts to classes/operations in order 
  to provide a clear Java-based example. This generation pattern is 
  outside of the scope of the Hyades platform and will be considered 
  as an example of using the test model to generate executable tests.
* The same mapping back from the Trace to the Testing model needs to 
  be further defined.

Rationale of these decisions:

* Hyades is committed to implement the U2TP model: It is therefore 
  mandatory not to change the U2TP model (unless we face some 
  restrictions with no possible workarounds: In this case, the 
  problem should be reported to the OMG). The right approach should 
  be to extend the U2TP with additional concepts.

* The U2TP MOF model should be a pure informational model without 
  any consideration to its realization into executable tests: E.g. 
  One could decide that a Test Suite should be implemented as an 
  entry in a table or a Test Case as a script interpreted by some 
  execution engine. This implies that a strict mapping to UML is too 
  restrictive. Therefore, it is important to clearly dissociate the 
  informational nature of the Test model and its implementation 
  nature.

Please note that the described position on the relationship between
the Hyades Test Model and the U2TP is an intermediate position in
the discussion.  Once the formal position is agreed, it will be
reflected in the FAQ.