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DMN TCK – Three Years Later

Blog: Collaborative Planning & Social Business

It was at the bpmNEXT conference three years ago that I was persuaded to start the DMN TCK group to strengthen the DMN standards effort. It has turned out better, and accomplished more than I imagined.

The “Technical Compatibility Kit” offers now:

A way for vendors to demonstrate their compliance to the DMN standard
Provide files to help vendors test for errors and become compliant to DMN
Customers to assess how compliant a vendor is to DMN

This is important because on the DM Community site there are 19 vendors claiming to support DMN. However, only 3 of them have results currently on the TCK site. There are three more that have had results in the past, but are still making the transition to DMN 1.2. OF the 13 remaining, some are design-time only and never actually execute the tests, and so would not have results in any case, however that still leaves a number of vendors claiming to execute DMN but no having results posted.

In simple terms, we must insist:

If the vendor does not have results on the DMN TCK site, then the vendor does not really execute DMN.

More Tests

We continue to expand the tests, and in the last few month this is largely due to the efforts of Greg McCreath from Australia. He found out about DMN and the TCK and while he was reading the spec, just started writing tests for all the conditions. This is normal for “test-first” development approach. He quickly added 500 tests to the collection, and there are approximately 600 more delayed waiting for review. Here are the current counts:

Participants

I really want to recognize the tremendous efforts of the following participants:

Red Hat: Matteo has been critical to the entire effort, tirelessly reviewing every new case and making sure each is strictly following the spec. This entire effort would be nowhere without the help of Red Hat.
Goldman Sachs: Octavian has also been critical in reviewing every new test, and carrying any questions to the RTF for discussion.
Trisotech: Simon has been attending every meeting and helping in a number of ways.
Doug McCreath: as mentioned above, contributed a wealth of new tests.
Fujitsu: supports my time running the meetings, and certainly my honor to do so.

Future

We still do not have 100% coverage, and so many more tests are needed. New tests in decision services and importing models is a new challenge to the test framework that we will be working through in the comings.

In my presentation at bpmNEXT I mentioned that I would like to see a standard way to invoke a decision service through a JSON REST API, and several attendees echoed their desire for the same. So I am hoping to add that to the agenda.

We have achieved enough success to cement our place int he future. The main goal at this point is to be the lighthouse showing who has and has not implemented things correctly, build on the solid rock foundation of freely available executable code.

References

DMN TCK Turns Two – April 20, 2018
Joining the DMN TCK – April 3, 2018
Update on DMN TCK – September 1, 2017
Initial DMN Test Results – June 5, 2017
DMN Technology Compatibility Kit (TCK) – January 18, 2017
What if the new Standard breaks the old tests? – July 19, 2018
Vendor Results Site
GitHub Site