News

Eclipse aims to extend testing

• By Michael W. Bucken
• December 18, 2002

The Eclipse standards consortium (http://www.eclipse.org) has launched an effort to allow the integration of testing and other automated software quality tools from multiple vendors. The effort was organized by Eclipse members IBM (http://www.ibm.com), Parasoft (http://www.parasoft.com), Rational Software (http://www.rational.com), Scapa Technologies (http://www.scapatech.com) and Telelogic (http://www.telelogic.com).

According to Eclipse officials, the so-celled Project Hyades framework (named after one of the largest visible star clusters outlining the head of the constellation Taurus) will ease efforts to integrate a variety of functional verification, quality assessment and load-testing tools with the Eclipse Platform's workbench and other tools.

Eclipse Board Chairman Skip McGaughey, on loan to the organization from IBM, described the effort as a ''major step for Eclipse, adding deployment evaluation functionality to the original [Eclipse] Integrated Development Environment.'' Officials said the Hyades framework is the first part of a future Eclipse integrated ''Everything'' environment that promises to take tools integration beyond the confines of a traditional IDE to full life-cycle support for projects.

In addition, ''The Hyades project is significant because it addresses quality assurance practices throughout development, deployment, testing and management, including static code analysis, functional testing and performance testing,'' said Parasoft CEO Adam Kolawa.

Backers predict the Hyades project will boost the use of testing tools and thus the sales of member companies. ''The practical difficulties and costs of using test tools are significant barriers to adoption,'' said Mike Norman, CEO, Scapa Technologies. ''By using Eclipse to provide interoperability amongst test tools, and to bind test tools into the wider software tools environment, the Hyades project will reduce the costs of testing and test tools and allow more people to deliver software that is better tested.''

Eclipse, now in its second release, is described as a universal tools platform that includes internationalization features and tools integration support for several platforms, including QNX, Sun Solaris, HP-UX, IBM AIX, Windows and desktop Linux.