Thanks. Excellent.

Of course, the tests can be limited to a business process of which the document under test is a part. In a way this binds the testing not only to the business document but also to it's business process - an interesting aspect of the SBS and other business language profiles perhaps.

So here the TA has to take into account not just the subset but also the business process of which it participates. So the spec can't really include the TAs as such unless it can generalise them for all anticipated business processes or somehow make the assertions independant of the processes.

I did imagine there will be quite a few layers to test and also that these might inter-relate in some way - is that a problem though? inter-relating layers of validation? A test in one layer might depend on results from another layer. This means there is a sequence in testing with dependencies even crossing between layers of testing. What happens if any tests are mutually dependant or if two layers of tests are mutually dependant? Is it necessary to declare all depend- encies somehow in the TAs? What if dependencies existed between different sets of assertions (if the assertions were split for different audiences as I think you suggest) but not all test sets were used as supplied. In that case making dependencies explicit would show up the mismatches. But if the test assertions were put into the same file then ID and IDREF could maybe be used to assure of the integrity of dependencies between id and ref to some extent when validating the TA document. Else XInclude or the like might be used if dependencies crossed file boundaries.

-- Stephen Green

Partner SystML, http://www.systml.co.uk Tel: +44 (0) 117 9541606

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

Quoting Dave Pawson <dave...@gmail.com>: