intertwingly

David Herron: Robert Burrell Donkin (JCP: Time For An OpenTCK) and Steve Loughran (Open tests for open standards) discuss their thoughts about an “Open TCK”.  These are interesting thoughts .. ones that make it tempting to conclude that there must be an open TCK for Java...Remember that for Java there are at least four different classifications of test suites that exist:

1. The TCK’s and the JCK are specifically focused on conformance with the specifications.
2. The Unit and Regression suite is developed by the Java SE development team.
3. The performance tests, benchmarks etc, some of which are standard open benchmarks and some of which are in-house benchmarks.
4. The functional tests developed by the software quality engineering team (SQE).

Again I am talking about the fourth of those, the functional test suites.

Question: why aren’t we talking about #1?

As Mark Wielaard states:

trying to negotiate a special deal for a select private group behind a NDA just doesn’t make sense for a open, distributed, collaborative group effort, especially not if you want to build bridges towards other communities and share efforts. Been there, done that, didn’t like the t-shirt.

Update: David Herron explains: I cannot comment on it.  Understood.