TML: an XML-based test modeling language

Quality is a key property of modern software systems. In addition, to quality improvement strategies such as CMM or CMMI and manual checking approaches such as reviews or inspections, software testing is the major quality assurance activity in most projects. Literally speaking, software testing is nearly as essential as writing code itself. Due to its prominent role there are quite a number of commercial and open-source test tools available. However, the question remains if an organisation should rely on a single tool or if it should follow a more general strategy using several tools? Practical experience has shown that the latter strategy is more promising by covering multiple quality aspects that cannot be covered by a single tool, although it requires a means of communication between tools (i.e., a tool independent test language). This paper introduces a XML-based and test tool independent test modeling language that support creating general test cases. The language separates test logic from test tool specific code. Thus, a test case only has to be specified once and can then be executed by several test tools.