The STCL test tools architecture

The Software Test Community Leaders (STCL) group is an IBM-wide initiative focused on improving software test and quality practices within the corporation. In 1999, we began working to develop an architecture to integrate both new and existing test tools into solutions for use in the testing organizations across IBM. This paper discusses the requirements for the architecture, as well as the issues associated with developing a solution architecture for a large base of tools that span a variety of platforms and domains. The architecture is being designed and developed to address three concerns for integrating testing tools: integration of the data across tools and repositories, integration of the control across tools, and integration to provide a single graphical user interface into the tool set. Because of the heterogeneous nature of the platforms and domains the architecture must support, extensibility is essential. We address each of these three integration concerns using an open-source framework that operates on a set of standardized but extensible entities.