Acceptance tests define exactly what stake-holders expect of a system and are therefore a critical part of the system specification. Automation of these tests has gained popularity within the agile software community, following the success of Test and Behaviour Driven Development, and are commonly referred to as Executable Specifications. The popularity has given rise to the development of a number of software tools that support the definition and execution of acceptance tests. As you would expect, there are also a range of engineering tools that support automated design verification. However, there seems to be some fundamental differences between the two approaches and a potential opportunity to improve engineering design by applying these software based techniques.
Automated Acceptance Tests for Engineering Design (Executable Specifications)
Posted by Adrian Smith
on August 07, 2008
Open Source Computational Engineering Tools 2
Posted by Adrian Smith
on August 02, 2008
Engineering analysis software has been traditionally dominated by large commercial vendors such as MathWorks (MATLAB), MSC (NASTRAN/PATRAN), ANSYS (ANSYS and Fluent), Dassault Systemes (CATIA) and SIEMENS (NX and FEMAP). This is probably because these tools attract a comparatively small user base and therefore have not featured heavily within the Open Source community. However, that assumption may now be seriously questioned, as there are numerous software tools emerging that challenge the commercial equivalents.