Joaquin Prado
The first Lightweight IoT blog post by Hatem Oueslati of IoTerop highlighted the importance of interoperability as fundamental to the success of the Internet of Things (IoT). Today, most IoT solutions available are proprietary and incompatible with one another. Costs incurred due to fragmentation are too high for suppliers, developers and users. But even if developers do use standardized solutions to build their products, how will they know their solutions will be interoperable with other products in the market? The answer is interoperability testing.
The Case for Interoperability Testing:
Interoperability is the noun form of the word interoperable defined as “Relating to systems, especially of computers or telecommunications, that are capable of working together without being specially configured to do so”. Interoperability testing is the practice of testing one or more products from various companies to see if they can communicate with one another and interact in the way they are intended.
OMA TestFests are designed to validate the correctness of specifications such as LightweightM2M in a multi vendor environment. Companies with different backgrounds take the same specifications, interpret them and build a Client or Server implementation that can interoperate without being specially configured to do so. When this happens, the specifications are validated, the industry knows that the specifications are robust and the developers know their products are interoperable.
This validation is key for any technology market to flourish. If products and services from different companies cannot communicate with each other, the market is reduced to vertical silos with no benefits to the end user.
OMA TestFests provide an opportunity for companies to validate their own product in a closed environment. At OMA TestFests the implementations under test are not judged based on their maturity or any other parameter. The events are a great opportunity for equipment and software vendors to validate their implementation in a multi-vendor environment that it is sealed by a Non-Disclosure Agreement. The events represent a great opportunity for developers and test engineers to see how their implementation is performing with other implementations in the market.
The next OMA TestFest was announced this week, and will take place May 17-19, 2017. The TestFest will be hosted by Smith Micro at their facility in Pittsburgh, PA, USA. Testing will take place Wednesday, May 17 through Friday, May 19 from 9:00 to 18:00 daily. Registration for the TestFest is open to the public through Friday, April 7. New LightweightM2M (LwM2M) test cases will be available at the event based on industry demand. The TestFest is open to any organization including both OMA members and non-members for testing client or server implementations of LwM2M, as well as any OMA Enabler for which there are 3 clients and 3 servers registered.
Speaking of Test Cases:
In support of the upcoming TestFest, the OMA Device Management Working Group has released a survey to evaluate the current LwM2M Test Cases in the Enabler Test Specification (ETS). The aim of this survey is to determine the interest in and quality of previously tested cases and to identify any missing cases. The results of this survey will influence which cases will be tested during the May TestFest as specified in OMA-TS-LightweightM2MV1_0. This survey is now open to the public through Friday, March 10, at https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/OMA-LwM2M-Test-Case-Survey.
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