News From Software Research, Inc.

nf News From Software Research, Inc.

News From Software Research, Inc.

Here, in reverse-date order, are announcements by Software Research, Inc.

25 October 2024
User Forum Converted to Archive State eValid users have for quite some time relied on the eValid User Forum for answers to usage and effectiveness questions about application of eValid technology to the testing of their websites. Over the years the forum has seen over 5800 separate posts, covering over 2900 topics. The earliest message dates from mid-2008.
However, as the number of active eValid users has decreased, so has the number of questions raised in the eValid User Forum decreased..
More recently the user community has become very small and, accordingly, we have suspended the User Forum from accepting new queries. However, for archival purposes the history of User Forum activity is being kept alive.
01 July 2024
Conversion to New Servers Beginning this month, and continuing through the end of the year, we will be converting to a new server complex. This affects the basic Software Research, eValid, TestWorks, and Qualweek websites.
01 May 2024
eValid Patent Assertions Ends After an intense period of activity from early 2011 through 2023, eValid's patent assertion activity has ended. In that period, ~20 patent-infringement lawsuits were filed atainst USA-based firms whose products were believed to be infringing the eValid portfolio of a total of 10 United States patents. The overwhelming majority of these actions was successful.
15 December 2023
BLOG Reports of Forum Activity Discontinued Effective immediately, reports of eValid Forum activity in the eValid BLOG have been discontinued.
In the future the will be maintained for archival purposes. It is a valuable archival resource describing the eValid introduction, patenting, and initial deployment, 2000-2009.
20 July 2023
eValid "Twitter" Activity Ending We offer thanks to our eValid users and interested professionals who follow our regular "tweets" on Twitter. Software Research, Inc., has provided a "feed" on Twitter for over a decade and the feedback has been quite positive.
But times have changed.
The recent public controversies about social media websites, including Facebook and Twitter, among many others, have been very concerning. Software Research, Inc. is not a political organization. and its eValid product suite is a purely technical offering aimed solely at improving quality of websites. Even so, acting out of an abundance of caution, we have decided to terminate our regular postings on Twitter hereafter.
eValid users and other interested professionals who wish to can look for insights and discussions about eValid in the eValid User Forum.
30 June 2022
Remembering Robert Larson Dr. Robert E. Larson, a prior Software Research, Inc. (SR) Board of Directors member, passed away 10 March 2022. (See: R. E. Larson biography).
During his tenure on the SR board he guided the early stages of evolution of the TestWorks™ product line into the eValid™ suite.
A professional colleague of Dr. Miller from the 1980's, Dr. Larson was involved in Ballistic Missile Defense, as CEO of Scientific Controls, Inc. (SCI), and later as the CEO of the Woodside Fund (an investment firm). He participated with other SR board members in lively discussions at SR's Third Street and Minnesota Street locations.
It was at one of SR's quarterly planning sessions in the mid-1990's that Dr. Larson argued -- very convincingly -- that the future lay in the the testing of web browser enabled applications, and not in UNIX-based client-server systems, such as TestWorks&trade.
That advice led SR's research to be refocused on developing testing products for web applications, which in turn led to the development [and patenting] of the eValid™ product suite.
26 February 2022
SR Communications Digitized As part of our continuing digitization project, we have completed scanning hard-copy versions of SR's original Testing Techniques Newsletter dating from 1978. A summary of this material is found here:
SR/TestWorks/QualityWeek/eValid -- Outgoing Communication Summary
The material here includes digitization of all TTN, QTN, and QMM issues. After January 1994 all SR outbound communications were 100% online.
25 February 2022
Historic Interest: Software Engineering Automated Tools (SEAT) Index Digitized Beginning in the 1970's staff members at Software Research, Inc., collected detailed technical material on commercially products that were available to support creation of the Software Engineering Automated Tools (SEAT) Index. This was done at first for research purposes, but soon the need for wider dispersal of this kind of information was noted in the industry.
The SEAT Index that resulted from the research resulted in a report that was sold to the general public:
SR SEAT Index, 628 Pages, September 1982.
This is the 6th (and final) revision of the SEAT Index. The ongoing research project ran for nearly three years, and the hard-copy material -- over 550 files -- consumed an entire full-size 5-drawer file cabinet. That material was discarded long ago, and a single copy of the printed SEAT Index was the basis for the archival scan above.
In parallel, an NBS effort lead by Mr. Raymond C. Houghton, accumulated [primarily for US Government use] this report: NBS Special Publication 500-88, Software Development Tools In addition, there were accumulations of software tool descriptions and documentation by TRW Systems (a government contractor) and by D. J. Reifer Associates (a private consultancy), among others.
Given that nearly four decades of have transpired since the SEAT Index was first created, it is interesting to compare the "automated tools" situation in the last 1970's and early 1980's with what is available today.
January 28, 2022
SR Digitization Project
As part of our continuing effort to digitize all SR/TestWorks/eValid/QualityWeek and QualityWeek Europe material, we have recently completed finding and scanning all of the old Testing Techniques Newsletter (TTN) issues:
TTN Consolidated Issue (1977-1994) [281 pages, 186 MB]

Software Quality researchers and practitioners may be interested in the material because it captures very early SR activities in the software quality area -- when the state of technology was very young and rather immature compared with today.
Note that the Winter 1987/1988 issue advertised the very first Quality Week Conference (May 1988, San Francisco), after which the field of "Software Testing and Quality Assurance" became rather more organized.

January 14, 2022
QW/QWE Digitization
Software Quality researchers and practitioners may be interested to know that we have recently completed putting all the material from the early and late QualityWeek/QualityWeek Europe conferences online. Previously only the last four years of events (1999-2002) were available online.
Here is the link to the complete document:

QW/QWE Consolidated Conference Material Inventory

As you may note there are still "some missing pieces" but we believe the material is 99% complete. That page will point to updates and other parts as they are completed.
Note: The material pointed to in this inventory total some ~8.7 GB of data in ~130+ individual files, mostly PDFs, all of which are fully searchable documents.
June 28, 2021
New eValid Patent Issued
An additional eValid patent has been granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).
Dated 29 June 2021 and titled Spidering a Website From a Browser Using a Document Object Model, US Patent #11,048,857, it is the tenth patent in the eValid patent portfolio.
In addition to the previously issued eValid Patents in the portfolio, several additional patent applications are currently on file with the USPTO.
November 5, 2020
Domain Name Error Repaired
Users have reported that a domain name expiration error appears at the top of some eValid pages.
This problem has been traced to an erroneous reference to a non-existing domain and this deficiency has been fixed.
We apologize for any inconvenience.
December 11, 2019
New eValid Patent Issued
An additional eValid patent has been granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).
Dated 26 November 2019 and titled Driving a Web Browser for Testing Web Pages Using a Document Object Model, US Patent #10,489,286, it is the ninth patent in the eValid patent portfolio.
In addition to the previously issued eValid Patents in the portfolio, several additional applications are currently on file with the USPTO.
January 21, 2019
QW/QWE Technical Content and Program Committee Summaries
The Quality Week and Quality Week/Europe (QW/QWE) Conferences served many thousands of attendees, and provided speaking opportunities for a large number of technical professionals.
Here is the complete QW/QWE Author/Title/Affiliation Index: 1988 — 2002.
QW/QWE Author/Title/Affiliation Index

This table can be shown sorted by Author, by Company, by Title, by Date or by clicking on the column title, which also shows the direction of the sorted display.
The papers were all vetted by the QW/QWE Program Committee (Advisory Board). Here is the complete list of
QW/QWE Program Committee Members: 1988 — 2002

December 19, 2018
Facebook Participation Terminated
Like many in the computer science community, we have been concerned for some time about the ethical issues that are raised by Facebook and similar social media websites.
Our commitment to software quality also includes carefully monitoring of, and possibly the avoidance of using, technological methods that could have negative community impacts.
As has become widely publicized in the prior year, Facebook provides a web application product that is implemented with sophisticated web browser technology that permits capture of a great deal of information about users' online behavior.
The technology used by Facebook is based in many ways on the same technology which is used by eValid.
We firmly believe that responsible application of this technology by eValid users in testing and validating websites is completely appropriate and safe, because eValid is used only by computing professionals in strictly controlled and secure circumstances.
Accordingly, to avoid even the appearance of having cooperated with and/or supported possible misuse of the underlying web browser technologies that are used by Facebook, and acting out of abundance of caution, we have terminated feeding any information into our previous company-based Facebook account and we have requested permanent elimination of that account and all data stored therein.
November 1, 2018
Remembering Boris Beizer
It is a sad time in the software testing and quality assurance community: we have lost one of the true icons and original thinkers of the entire field.
Dr. Boris Beizer passed away on 7 October 2018 at the age of 84.
Boris's two major works, Software Testing Techniques and System Software Testing and Quality Assurance, were the technical underpinning of the majority of the ideas and developments in the software testing and QA field, starting in the early 1980's and continuing to the present. The ideas he emphasized in both books and in his consulting and speaking activities included (but were hardly limited to) structural analysis of software to reveal its properties, automatic analysis of program behavior, and systematic application of rigorous methods of software inspection and dynamic testing. Almost every type of automated program analysis related to testing was foretold in his work.
Boris was an extraordinarily active participant in the testing community. He attended and spoke frequently at many software testing oriented events, and at conferences often was seen engaged in intense debate with attendees over the pros and cons of a wide range of relevant technologies. His observations and interplay were always direct, very often humorous, never evil-minded, and genuinely respectful.
We first met Boris in ~1989 and he became a regular participant at the Quality Week and Quality Week Europe (QW/QWE) conferences. After he gave a half-day tutorial at QW/1991 he recommended that we form a Program Committee to shape future QW/QWE technical programs.
We followed his advice, beginning with QW/1992, with Boris as one of the charter members of the QW/QWE Program Committee. He served on that committee all the way through QW/2002. His reviews and critiques of proposed papers and presentations were regularly merciless and always very much on point. He kept the QW/QWE programs honest and lively! For him it was always about Quality with a capital Q!
His energy, style, directness, honesty, and dedication will be missed by us all.
-- Edward Miller, Rita Bral
January 17, 2017
Server Migration Process Completed
The machines that serve the different sub-websites that are part of the Software Research, Inc. family of products and services have now been upgraded.
Users should have experienced no interruptions of service, including those who employ eValid products in web-authenticated license modes (commercial license mode).
There remain some small issues regarding proper function of the email and these issues are expected to be revolved soon.
Please contact us at evalid@gmail.com if you encounter any problems.
January 2, 2017
Use of "TestWorks Conference" Not Authorized
We have become aware that an organization in Amsterdam, Netherlands, has been offering a technical conference entitled "TestWorks Conference".
While we wish them the best of luck in their endeavor we wish to point out that we did not authorize them to use of the TestWorks™ name.
In addition, at attempt to reach the organizers in order to establish authorized use of our long-held trademark was unsuccessful.

25 October 2024 User Forum Converted to Archive State	eValid users have for quite some time relied on the eValid User Forum for answers to usage and effectiveness questions about application of eValid technology to the testing of their websites. Over the years the forum has seen over 5800 separate posts, covering over 2900 topics. The earliest message dates from mid-2008. However, as the number of active eValid users has decreased, so has the number of questions raised in the eValid User Forum decreased.. More recently the user community has become very small and, accordingly, we have suspended the User Forum from accepting new queries. However, for archival purposes the history of User Forum activity is being kept alive.
01 July 2024 Conversion to New Servers	Beginning this month, and continuing through the end of the year, we will be converting to a new server complex. This affects the basic Software Research, eValid, TestWorks, and Qualweek websites.
01 May 2024 eValid Patent Assertions Ends	After an intense period of activity from early 2011 through 2023, eValid's patent assertion activity has ended. In that period, ~20 patent-infringement lawsuits were filed atainst USA-based firms whose products were believed to be infringing the eValid portfolio of a total of 10 United States patents. The overwhelming majority of these actions was successful.
15 December 2023 BLOG Reports of Forum Activity Discontinued	Effective immediately, reports of eValid Forum activity in the eValid BLOG have been discontinued. In the future the will be maintained for archival purposes. It is a valuable archival resource describing the eValid introduction, patenting, and initial deployment, 2000-2009.
20 July 2023 eValid "Twitter" Activity Ending	We offer thanks to our eValid users and interested professionals who follow our regular "tweets" on Twitter. Software Research, Inc., has provided a "feed" on Twitter for over a decade and the feedback has been quite positive. But times have changed. The recent public controversies about social media websites, including Facebook and Twitter, among many others, have been very concerning. Software Research, Inc. is not a political organization. and its eValid product suite is a purely technical offering aimed solely at improving quality of websites. Even so, acting out of an abundance of caution, we have decided to terminate our regular postings on Twitter hereafter. eValid users and other interested professionals who wish to can look for insights and discussions about eValid in the eValid User Forum.
30 June 2022 Remembering Robert Larson	Dr. Robert E. Larson, a prior Software Research, Inc. (SR) Board of Directors member, passed away 10 March 2022. (See: R. E. Larson biography). During his tenure on the SR board he guided the early stages of evolution of the TestWorks™ product line into the eValid™ suite. A professional colleague of Dr. Miller from the 1980's, Dr. Larson was involved in Ballistic Missile Defense, as CEO of Scientific Controls, Inc. (SCI), and later as the CEO of the Woodside Fund (an investment firm). He participated with other SR board members in lively discussions at SR's Third Street and Minnesota Street locations. It was at one of SR's quarterly planning sessions in the mid-1990's that Dr. Larson argued -- very convincingly -- that the future lay in the the testing of web browser enabled applications, and not in UNIX-based client-server systems, such as TestWorks&trade. That advice led SR's research to be refocused on developing testing products for web applications, which in turn led to the development [and patenting] of the eValid™ product suite.
26 February 2022 SR Communications Digitized	As part of our continuing digitization project, we have completed scanning hard-copy versions of SR's original Testing Techniques Newsletter dating from 1978. A summary of this material is found here: SR/TestWorks/QualityWeek/eValid -- Outgoing Communication Summary The material here includes digitization of all TTN, QTN, and QMM issues. After January 1994 all SR outbound communications were 100% online.
25 February 2022 *Historic Interest: Software Engineering Automated Tools (SEAT) Index* Digitized**	Beginning in the 1970's staff members at Software Research, Inc., collected detailed technical material on commercially products that were available to support creation of the Software Engineering Automated Tools (SEAT) Index. This was done at first for research purposes, but soon the need for wider dispersal of this kind of information was noted in the industry. The SEAT Index that resulted from the research resulted in a report that was sold to the general public: SR SEAT Index, 628 Pages, September 1982. This is the 6th (and final) revision of the SEAT Index. The ongoing research project ran for nearly three years, and the hard-copy material -- over 550 files -- consumed an entire full-size 5-drawer file cabinet. That material was discarded long ago, and a single copy of the printed SEAT Index was the basis for the archival scan above. In parallel, an NBS effort lead by Mr. Raymond C. Houghton, accumulated [primarily for US Government use] this report: NBS Special Publication 500-88, Software Development Tools In addition, there were accumulations of software tool descriptions and documentation by TRW Systems (a government contractor) and by D. J. Reifer Associates (a private consultancy), among others. Given that nearly four decades of have transpired since the SEAT Index was first created, it is interesting to compare the "automated tools" situation in the last 1970's and early 1980's with what is available today.
January 28, 2022 SR Digitization Project	As part of our continuing effort to digitize all SR/TestWorks/eValid/QualityWeek and QualityWeek Europe material, we have recently completed finding and scanning all of the old Testing Techniques Newsletter (TTN) issues: TTN Consolidated Issue (1977-1994) [281 pages, 186 MB] Software Quality researchers and practitioners may be interested in the material because it captures very early SR activities in the software quality area -- when the state of technology was very young and rather immature compared with today. Note that the Winter 1987/1988 issue advertised the very first Quality Week Conference (May 1988, San Francisco), after which the field of "Software Testing and Quality Assurance" became rather more organized.
January 14, 2022 QW/QWE Digitization	Software Quality researchers and practitioners may be interested to know that we have recently completed putting all the material from the early and late QualityWeek/QualityWeek Europe conferences online. Previously only the last four years of events (1999-2002) were available online. Here is the link to the complete document: QW/QWE Consolidated Conference Material Inventory As you may note there are still "some missing pieces" but we believe the material is 99% complete. That page will point to updates and other parts as they are completed. Note: The material pointed to in this inventory total some ~8.7 GB of data in ~130+ individual files, mostly PDFs, all of which are fully searchable documents.
June 28, 2021 New eValid Patent Issued	An additional eValid patent has been granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Dated 29 June 2021 and titled Spidering a Website From a Browser Using a Document Object Model, US Patent #11,048,857, it is the tenth patent in the eValid patent portfolio. In addition to the previously issued eValid Patents in the portfolio, several additional patent applications are currently on file with the USPTO.
November 5, 2020 Domain Name Error Repaired	Users have reported that a domain name expiration error appears at the top of some eValid pages. This problem has been traced to an erroneous reference to a non-existing domain and this deficiency has been fixed. We apologize for any inconvenience.
December 11, 2019 New eValid Patent Issued	An additional eValid patent has been granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Dated 26 November 2019 and titled Driving a Web Browser for Testing Web Pages Using a Document Object Model, US Patent #10,489,286, it is the ninth patent in the eValid patent portfolio. In addition to the previously issued eValid Patents in the portfolio, several additional applications are currently on file with the USPTO.
January 21, 2019 QW/QWE Technical Content and Program Committee Summaries	The Quality Week and Quality Week/Europe (QW/QWE) Conferences served many thousands of attendees, and provided speaking opportunities for a large number of technical professionals. Here is the complete QW/QWE Author/Title/Affiliation Index: 1988 — 2002. QW/QWE Author/Title/Affiliation Index This table can be shown sorted by Author, by Company, by Title, by Date or by clicking on the column title, which also shows the direction of the sorted display. The papers were all vetted by the QW/QWE Program Committee (Advisory Board). Here is the complete list of QW/QWE Program Committee Members: 1988 — 2002
December 19, 2018 Facebook Participation Terminated	Like many in the computer science community, we have been concerned for some time about the ethical issues that are raised by Facebook and similar social media websites. Our commitment to software quality also includes carefully monitoring of, and possibly the avoidance of using, technological methods that could have negative community impacts. As has become widely publicized in the prior year, Facebook provides a web application product that is implemented with sophisticated web browser technology that permits capture of a great deal of information about users' online behavior. The technology used by Facebook is based in many ways on the same technology which is used by eValid. We firmly believe that responsible application of this technology by eValid users in testing and validating websites is completely appropriate and safe, because eValid is used only by computing professionals in strictly controlled and secure circumstances. Accordingly, to avoid even the appearance of having cooperated with and/or supported possible misuse of the underlying web browser technologies that are used by Facebook, and acting out of abundance of caution, we have terminated feeding any information into our previous company-based Facebook account and we have requested permanent elimination of that account and all data stored therein.
November 1, 2018 Remembering Boris Beizer	It is a sad time in the software testing and quality assurance community: we have lost one of the true icons and original thinkers of the entire field. Dr. Boris Beizer passed away on 7 October 2018 at the age of 84. Boris's two major works, Software Testing Techniques and System Software Testing and Quality Assurance, were the technical underpinning of the majority of the ideas and developments in the software testing and QA field, starting in the early 1980's and continuing to the present. The ideas he emphasized in both books and in his consulting and speaking activities included (but were hardly limited to) structural analysis of software to reveal its properties, automatic analysis of program behavior, and systematic application of rigorous methods of software inspection and dynamic testing. Almost every type of automated program analysis related to testing was foretold in his work. Boris was an extraordinarily active participant in the testing community. He attended and spoke frequently at many software testing oriented events, and at conferences often was seen engaged in intense debate with attendees over the pros and cons of a wide range of relevant technologies. His observations and interplay were always direct, very often humorous, never evil-minded, and genuinely respectful. We first met Boris in ~1989 and he became a regular participant at the Quality Week and Quality Week Europe (QW/QWE) conferences. After he gave a half-day tutorial at QW/1991 he recommended that we form a Program Committee to shape future QW/QWE technical programs. We followed his advice, beginning with QW/1992, with Boris as one of the charter members of the QW/QWE Program Committee. He served on that committee all the way through QW/2002. His reviews and critiques of proposed papers and presentations were regularly merciless and always very much on point. He kept the QW/QWE programs honest and lively! For him it was always about Quality with a capital Q! His energy, style, directness, honesty, and dedication will be missed by us all. -- Edward Miller, Rita Bral
January 17, 2017 Server Migration Process Completed	The machines that serve the different sub-websites that are part of the Software Research, Inc. family of products and services have now been upgraded. Users should have experienced no interruptions of service, including those who employ eValid products in web-authenticated license modes (commercial license mode). There remain some small issues regarding proper function of the email and these issues are expected to be revolved soon. Please contact us at evalid@gmail.com if you encounter any problems.
January 2, 2017 Use of "TestWorks Conference" Not Authorized	We have become aware that an organization in Amsterdam, Netherlands, has been offering a technical conference entitled "TestWorks Conference". While we wish them the best of luck in their endeavor we wish to point out that we did not authorize them to use of the TestWorks™ name. In addition, at attempt to reach the organizers in order to establish authorized use of our long-held trademark was unsuccessful.