Information Mapping Conformance Test Tools

Data exchange standards frequently contain ambiguity and, consequently, have the potential for differing interpretations. Because of this, conformance and interoperability testing capabilities are increasingly important to enable and maintain correct information exchange between e-business partners. Typically, testing of e-business systems is based on an architecture that identifies key modular stacks such as a communication protocol stack, interaction/business protocol stack, and message/content protocol stack. This paper describes test development and execution tools for a class of conformance tests in the message/content protocol stack called the informationmapping test. This test seeks to ensure that the semantics of any message elements are implemented and interpreted according to the intended meaning. The tools are designed to increase automation of the testing processes and decrease costs of test case development and execution. They are being used to support a self-testing capability in a B2Binteroperability project within the automotive industry. Currently, they are an extension to the ebXML Interoperability, Implementation, and Conformance (IIC) test framework specification, which was defined originally to test the communication protocol stack. This extension not only maintains the IIC architecture but also allows the information-mapping test to be independent of the communication protocol.