The Eclipse Foundation next month plans to announce a new open-source project to deliver an open platform for frameworks and services for test and performance tools used along the software development lifecycle.

According to foundation officials, the Eclipse Foundation will announce its Test and Performance Tools Platform Top Level Project at the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in San Francisco early next month. Intel Corp., an Eclipse member, will lead the project. The project will foster open-source collaboration in testing and other areas.

Essentially, the test and performance tools platform will provide an infrastructure upon which test and performance tools can be built. These tools include testing tools and tracing and profiling tools, as well as tools for logging, monitoring, tuning, analysis, autonomics and administration. In addition, the platform will include data collection services and user interfaces for tracing, executing test cases, and tracking logging and statistical behavior in local or remote execution environments, according to foundation officials.

In addition to Intel's leadership, SAP AG, Compuware Corp. and Berlin's Fraunhofer Institute Fokus will contribute to the test and performance project.

The new Test and Performance Top Level Project will extend the Eclipse Foundation's Hyades project, which began in 2002 and provides an infrastructure for tool interoperability to unify software quality efforts across development projects.

Mike Milinkovich, the executive director of Eclipse, called Hyades "one of the great achievements of the Eclipse community."

Click here to read about Milinkovich's recent appointment to the Eclipse Foundation.

Eclipse Foundation officials said the core interoperability layer of Hyades also will be at the center of the new platform. Known as the Hyades Core Platform, Intel will lead this project, too. Meanwhile, officials said three new subprojects will work under the new test and performance tools project: Hyades testing; Hyades Tracing and Profiling; and Hyades Monitoring.

Mike Norman, chief executive of Scapa Technologies Ltd., of Edinburgh, Scotland, who was the original leader of the Hyades Project and now leads the Hyades Testing project, said in a statement, "The involvement of Intel and other significant companies will ensure wider adoption of the open Hyades Core Platform as consensus architecture for innovative value-added products."

Last week, IBM's Corp.'s Lexington, Mass.-based Rational division said it is standardizing its testing tools on the Hyades open-source software quality platform, and the company also launched its new Continuously Ensure Quality (CEQ) initiative.

This article was originally published on eweek.com.