By Nathan Pocock, Director of Compliance at the OPC Foundation
OPC Certification Test Lab
In our last newsletter we reported a high number of test failures. Products are generally passing Compliance, Interoperability, and Usability on first attempt; application crashes and resource leaks continue to be the cause of most failures. In response, we released Certification Resource Efficiency Testing to provide step-by-step guidance on how to conduct high quality robustness, recovery, and stress testing within your own lab environment.
Certified OPC products are ideal for production use because they have been tested by the OPC Foundation Certification Test Lab for compliance, interoperability, usability, but most importantly: robust error handling and recovery that will provide years of reliable operations, greatly reducing the costly risks of unavailability and/or shutdown.
Here are the 2014 year-to-date Certification Test Lab test results:
- Tests completed: 34
- Products certified: 8, with 5 pending
- Failed: 21
Certification Test Lab Scheduling
100% of vendors with expired certifications (27) rescheduled their testing because they realize the value of certification and the responsibility of delivering high quality products to their customers.
Book your 2015 tests now. 2014 is already full and we anticipate an even busier 2015.
OPC Foundation Web Site
The OPC Foundation web site was recently enhanced to provide more transparency into the activities of the OPC Foundation deliverables, which includes Sample Applications, source code, and compliance test tools.
Image: Mantis data on the UA Compliance Test Tool (UACTT) page
Compliance Working Group Update
The Compliance Working Group (CMPWG) has recently completed and released an update to the UA Test-Case Specifications to include Alarms & Conditions. The test case specifications are available to OPC Foundation members here.
The CMPWG is currently working on test cases for the important functionality of Information Modelling in UA. The validation of an information model is crucial for the success of our collaboration partners, such as BACnet, ISA95, MDIS, PLCopen, and others. The group will formally release a tool [that is currently a prototype] that will convert a nodeset definition file (formally called “Nodeset2.xml”) and convert it to UA Compliance Test Tool scripts; this means our test tool will be able to validate the address space complies with general information modelling rules in addition to the specific object definitions defined by collaborations.
Contact the Compliance department if you have questions about joining the Compliance Working Group, the certification program or testing.