Subject: Re: Validation BOF brainstorming

From: [email-masked] (John Palombo)
Date: Thu, 29 Sep 1994 16:01:01 +0000

Erika,

Congratulations (I think!) on officially taking over as the AIW Validation
BOF Chair.  We agree that the work of the BOF is important (and will
become more so over time), and we would like to be proactive in making this
forum more beneficial to us all.  The following is a brain dump of the
sorts of activities we believe this forum should be pursuing.

1.      Definition of APPN Conformance.

All of us that have signed the APPN intellectual property agreement are
contractually bound to ensure that our APPN implementations conform to the
APPN standard as documented in the AIW Architecture of Record.  We view the
the Validation BOF as the formal part of the AIW that defines what
"conformance" means for APPN.  To this end we have contributed Network Node
test items in the past, and will shortly have available End Node test
items, to provide the detail of how conformance to the architecture is
evaluated.  This aspect of the BOF has received little attention in past
meetings, but in a formal sense is one its most important functions.

2.      Interoperability Testing

The Multivendor Connectivity Test (MVCT aka Connectathon) held over the
Summer was very useful to those of us that participated, and we would like
to see this repeated and expanded as more vendors have APPN implementations
to test.  Possible extensions to this are

-       adding the capability to test new aspects of the protocol (at
        present this is very important to us for HPR) - either in open
        sessions such as the MVCT, or by individual agreements (as was used
        for early VTAM V4R2 testing)

-       adding much greater access to back-level implementations (both IBM,
        and non-IBM) - in practice these are normally the products that
        cause problems in the field, so it would be good to test them in
        the lab first

-       conducting some form of remote Interoperability testing, where we
        connect together over a WAN, and don't all need to be in a room in
        Raleigh at the same time.

3.      Repository of Information about APPN Implementations

As an adjunct to our joint and separate testing activities it is very
useful to understand the capabilities of the different APPN nodes in a
particular test topology.  We should definitely try to maintain the
Function Sets supported matrix that Burt Gearhart is editing, and add new
products to it as they become available.

As we start to think about APPN conformance, it would also be very useful
to keep track of whatever output the conformance testing produces.  The
most obvious such output is a database of "deviations from the
architecture" in various products (although we recognize that this is
potentially a politically sensitive area which would need buy-in
from the participants).

4.      Testing tools.

This is probably the area we have discussed least over the past BOF
meetings.  It will obviously facilitate our interoperability testing if we
have a common set of applications to drive the tests (today it is APING and
MANDELBROT!).  The difficulty here is that there is normally commercial
value in the test tools we all use internally, which makes it more
difficult to give them away through the AIW.  This is certainly a topic we
should spend some time discussing at the next meeting.

I hope this helps the discussion.

Regards, John.

[Erika, over the past few weeks I have had no success distributing emails
through the mail exploders.  If this message also fails, and you have
not received an exploded message by the time you see your direct copy,
could you do me a favor, and distribute this copy to the exploders -
Thanks, John].

-- 
==============================================================
John Palombo ([email-masked])
Data Connection Limited
Telephone:   +44 81 366 1177
Fax:         +44 81 367 8501
==============================================================