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Test Environment for Software Calculating Measurement Uncertainties

Test Environment for Software Calculating Measurement Uncertainties

Software programs for the calculation of measurement uncertainties have to be validated thoroughly because of their importance for metrology. Over the past years the number of such software programs on the market has steadily increased, leading to frequent orders to validate one or more of them. It ist, especially for competitive bids, important to evaluate all software programs with the same methods, the same data and in the same depth. To ensure this, a test environment with universal test data basis was created.

The test environment contains ...

  • a data model, covering all aspects of measurement uncertainty calculations, including accompanying information like numeric resolution, number of significant digits, number formats, etc.,

  • a grammar, mapping the data model, and a parser, scanning xml files according to grammar,

  • a test data base with so called universal test cases, made to test each of the existing computation algorithms and other rules in the field of measurement uncertainty,

  • a set of converters, doing the adaptation of the universal test cases to specific test cases. The specific test cases take into consideration the properties of the software under test, like operating system, kind of user interface, used data formats.

 

The main properties of the test environment are ...

  • usability of the universal test cases for each kind of software, independent of operating system or user interface,

  • strict traceability of each test case and each test result to a certain computational or other rule,

  • filtering of the test cases to be used concerning single rules, single uncertainty topics, negative/positive cases etc.

Up to now the test environment was used to validate three software programs of different kind.