BARB Meeting

The Bluetooth SIG is in the process of greatly enhancing its testing and interoperability programs. One of the major programs in effort is a profile test system. In order to support this system, I have decided to create a team in Bellevue, Washington to develop and test this application. It uses TTCN for the test specification language and the program is an execution engine that enables a PC to emulate any device for testing profiles which implement the complimentary role.

The BARB had scheduled a meeting this week in Redmond to be hosted by Microsoft. Due to scheduling conflicts the meeting could not be held on the Microsoft campus. As such, I decided to host the meeting at the new SIG office in Bellevue. This was a bit unfortunate as our office wasn’t really ready to host such a meeting. We are still under construction and didn’t even have a network or phones in place when the meeting started. (See pictures below) Luckily for us, the building that the Bellevue SIG office is located has meeting areas that tenants can reserve. Thus the BARB meeting wasn’t physically located in the SIG office under construction. Instead it was in a nice meeting room across the hall.

The BARB meeting went well. The schedule for the 2005 specification was reviewed. I believe the features for this core specification are well on their way to completion. The biggest concern in the BARB was whether or not prototypes could be built for all the new features quickly enough. This is a legitimate concern. The new Bluetooth SIG process requiring at least three interoperable prototypes to be demonstrated before a specification is released poses a great burden on our members. They need to implement and test each feature before the specification is ratified. Even thought this requires a signification amount of effort, I believe the result of a rock solid specification is worth the effort.

The Bellevue SIG office will be fully operational for the next meeting we host!