Hi there! This entry comes from the Cisco Toolapalooza 2007, Cisco’s by invitation trade show for testing tool vendors related to Cisco’s business.

It’s always striking how the people on the Silicon Valley (and U.S. in general) are open and direct and up-to-the-point when compared to their European colleagues. It’s definitely a different atmosphere—the sense of efficiency, if you wish, is everywhere in the air.

This event was shadowed, most unfortunately, by a horrendous massacre at the Virginia Tech, certainly the number one news in the States for many days in a row. The country is showing respect to the murdered and their families and the flags are half-way down everywhere.

Our presentation on our offering is still upcoming in a few hours, and there will be also a presentation on model-based testing by, it seems, Cisco people themselves. It makes sense as the guys here are always scanning for new ideas to make their life better and their products more competitive. Certainly many things could and should be learned by the European industry from the attitude here. No wonder that States is the #1 power in software industry.

Here at the end a picture of my colleague happy at the stand…

I spent the last weekend in sunny Braga, Northern Portugal. The occasion was the Model Based Testing 2007 workshop, held in conjunction with the ETAPS conference. The country was beautiful, weather pleasant and food very cheap (at least when compared with the Finnish price level).

On the scientific level, the quality of the papers was mixed. Maybe one of the highlights was the presentation by Swedish researchers about efficient test generation for timed systems. This reasearch was, of course, coupled with the well-known UPPAAL toolset and its derivatives.

On Sunday morning I gave my invited talk on the use of model-based testing in standardization. This joint presentation by Mr. Stephan Schulz from ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute) was more about pragmatics than theory. In particular, in the presentation I summarized how the application of model-based testing in standardization differs from applying it in, say, in-house software development.

Currently there are so many small workshops and conferences touching model-based testing (e.g. MBT, A-MOST, MoDeVa, FATES, M-TOOS) that one could guess some consolidation will take place in the future. Maybe a conference dedicated to model-based testing..? Whatever “model-based testing” then means. I proposed in the workshop that one interpretation of “model-based testing” in the research world could be “algorithmic methods for black-box testing that are based on behavioral models of systems under test”, and this was received quite well.