From: veit@du9ds3.uni-duisburg.de (Holger Veit)
Subject: Re: Change this Group Name?
Date: 26 Aug 92 14:02:04 GMT
Reply-To: veit@du9ds3.uni-duisburg.de
Organization: Uni-Duisburg FB9 Datenverarbeitung

In <1992Aug25.183729.27815@venus.ic.cmc.ca> yooho@ursula.ic.cmc.ca (Yoo Ho Cho) writes:

>In article <l9ko46INNls@bashful.crhc.uiuc.edu> patel@bashful.crhc.uiuc.edu (Janak H. Patel) writes:
>>I am annoyed at notes posted in this news group which have nothing to
>>do with LSI or VLSI Testing.  It seems lots of news readers are
>>interpreting "testing" to mean just about anything, except what
>>this group was created for!  It seems they ignore the components "comp"
>>and/or "lsi" while  interpreting "testing".

Your observation is unfortunately correct. This group was really not intended
for junk postings. I (and Nikolaus Gouders) had proposed this group (okay: 
look into the header for flame mails to me ;-), since we are involved in 
academical research on testing (as well as you), and think that there should
be a more closer contact than the usual meetings at conferences.

>>
>>Here is a suggestion: Change the group name to avoid confusion.
>[...]

>I am not certain a comp.lsi.defects or comp.lsi.[ testing areas .. ]
>would provide the group with sufficient coverage of testing issues. 
>Also the incredibly low amount of activity in this group probably doesn't
>make the effort worthwhile.

When the proposal for the group was made, it was called 'comp.lsi.cat' for
computer aided testing, according to the similiar abbreviation CAD. The
majority of people who replied to the discussion found this name misleading
and preferred something like '*.test', which is as you see is the usual
waste basket for junk posts. Calling the group '*.testing' should have avoided
such noise as we thought, because the combination of COMP and LSI and TESTING 
is too strange to make one think that this is just a junk group for
chip designers. I already had a bad feeling about the naming that time, but
it is good democratic tradition to accept the opinion of the majority.

The voting process showed a result of 179 : 32 which I considered to be
sufficient for a special interests group. Unfortunately, I haven't seen 
many postings from the 179 persons who voted with YES. A newsgroup lives and
dies with postings! I cannot imagine that everyone is interested in
design (comp.lang.vhdl, comp.lang.verilog, comp.sys.mentor, comp.lsi*), but
nobody in testing of all the stuff produced. So don't be afraid to 
contribute to this group (of course not by postings of the above mentioned
junk type). Notice that no one here will consider even a "stupid question" 
(forget this, there are no stupid questions) as junk postings.


>Does anyone have the charter for this group ? Posting the charter once a month
>should help keep some of the noise down. If someone will send a copy of the
>charter, I'm willing to do a monthly "reminder" posting.

>Yoo Ho Cho

The following is (a slightly changed) charter from the call for votes. 
Feel free to modify and reformat it, and add further things that belong to this
information sheet. I would be happy if you would be willing to do a regular 
posting.

Holger

--
|  |   / Holger Veit             | INTERNET: veit@du9ds3.uni-duisburg.de
|__|  /  University of Duisburg  | BITNET: veit%du9ds3.uni-duisburg.de@UNIDO
|  | /   Dept. of Electr. Eng.   | "No, my programs are not BUGGY, these are
|  |/    Inst. f. Dataprocessing |          just unexpected FEATURES"


-----------------------------------------

NAME/GROUP: 
    comp.lsi.testing

STATUS:
    unmoderated 

CHARTER:
    This newsgroup is intended to cover all aspects of the testing of
    electronic circuits such as (but not restricted to)
      *  Testing of Digital and Analog Devices
      *  Automatic Test Pattern Generation
      *  Fault Modeling and Fault Simulation
      *  Design for Testability
      *  Scan Design and Built-in Self Test
      *  PCB-Test and Boundary Scan
      *  Design Verification

    Important topics are (again not restricted to)
      * Announcements (conferences, workshops, special issues)
      * Books on testing
      * Standards
      * Benchmarks
      * Questions and answers
      * Discussions concerning technical or algorithmic problems
      * Available commercial and public domain tools

    PLEASE: DO NOT USE THIS GROUP FOR "test" POSTINGS TO CHECK YOUR
    MAILER OR NEWS SYSTEM. THERE ARE OTHER SPECIAL GROUPS FOR THIS
    PURPOSE, such as "alt.test", "news.test", "local.test" ETC.

WHY THIS GROUP:
    The ever increasing number of publications on testing shows a
    vivid and growing interest in that subject. A newsgroup on 
    testing will stimulate and accelerate the exchange of related 
    information among interested network users. It makes it easier 
    to recognize current trends in testing, especially for novices. 
    
    The discussion period showed a general agreement on the theme.
    Our first proposal for the name of the group was comp.lsi.cat,
    which is similiar to comp.lsi.cad. A number of contributors 
    remarked that this name is not generally understandable or 
    misleading. Among the proposed alternatives were:
    comp.lsi.test, comp.lsi.testing, comp.lsi.ate, comp.lsi.ft (fault 
    tolerance). Taking into account that ".test" may sound like
    "alt.test", "news.test" which have a specific function within the
    USENET hierarchy, the proposed name "comp.lsi.testing" should be
    the most understandable and general one. 

    Some authors commented that there are existing groups like comp.lsi
    which do not have an extreme news flow to date. Splitting therefore
    should not be necessary. We have never intended to split any group
    due to "net bandwidth", comp.lsi.testing is a new thread. A closer
    look at comp.lsi[.cad] shows that these groups are mostly design oriented,
    and this probably raises the level for participation of non-designers.
    Shortly: there was and is no forum for testing yet.

-- 
|  |   / Holger Veit             | INTERNET: veit@du9ds3.uni-duisburg.de
|__|  /  University of Duisburg  | BITNET: veit%du9ds3.uni-duisburg.de@UNIDO
|  | /   Dept. of Electr. Eng.   | "No, my programs are not BUGGY, these are
|  |/    Inst. f. Dataprocessing |          just unexpected FEATURES"