The following input was collected from the TPTP requirements group at the TPTP Face to Face meeting 28-30 September 2004
1. Enterprise Ready: extending monitoring capabilities to become effective in the later stages of software life cycle, developing models of the components and interactions in the application delivery chain which can be linked into data collection, enhancing the support of large data volumes in trace, log and statistical models, increasing interoperability with enterprise security infrastructure and an increased focus on whole-project integration testing to ensure effective interoperability amongst all TPTP components and the rest of the Eclipse environment.
2. Team Support: An important objective is to effectively embed the TPTP tooling within a complete development process. Hooks will be provided within the TPTP infrastructure to link testing tools to requirements tracking tools and defect tracking tools.
3. Usability: We will focus on ease of use through enhanced user documentation, tutorials, white papers, demonstrations, and a wide range of enhancements to the user interface to streamline basic processes and clarify concepts and terminology.
4. Broaden Community: A range of initiatives will be taken to broaden the community of potential and actual users of TPTP. Technically this will include additional integration of open source test tool technologies, coverage of C/C++ and web protocols in trace models, additional data collection target platforms including embedded devices, and more data collection agents – particularly focusing on open source technologies. There will be additional entry-level documentation, marketing and an extensive outreach program to the Eclipse community for additional contribution and adoption.
5. Exemplary Tools: the existing tools were conceived as samples, rather than as exemplary, they are deficient in many areas of useability and in some cases interface to the infrastructure in non-exemplary ways. The plan is to fix this so that they use the infrastructure correctly and within the domains which they target provide a high-quality user experience out of the box. In addition, there will be progressive adoption of the TPTP tools and infrastructure as a test platform for the project itself, which is in turn likely to drive refinements into the tools.
TPTP requires to access data models which cannot necessarily be stored in physical memory and requires additional paging and relational back-end support.
Team hooks – The requirements-tests-defects hooks require annotations in the EMF models of the tests and probably some changes to EMF
Remote repository – a requirement in support of tools which implement the OMG MDA is for a tool within one workspace to remotely update the workspace of another tool.
TPTP has concerns that it has a dependency chain through to a technology project, and would like to see a promotion of this project into a regular PMC
TPTP would like the workbench logging API to log against CBE so that logs can be read inside TPTP log viewers, but is mindful of circular dependencies and footprint issues and would like to work with the Workbench team to resolve this.
TPTP has some enhancements planned for its existing SVG charting engine on its 3.2 timeline (end Q4) it would like to push these feature/requirements into Birt as an early code contribution to avoid subsequent package renaming.
Longer term TPTP wants to get out of the charting/viewing game completely and would like to realign its editor/viewer widgetry with BIRT, this would require BIRT to adopt EMF as an intermediate data representation layer and provide generic widgetry against EMF models.