XML-Based Software Quality Assurance

One measure of success for a software developer is how a product behaves in accordance with prescribed and unexpected inputs. Determining the level of quality or rate of defects has, historically, been an extremely laborious, human intensive process. Ultimately, process flows within software represented as finite state machines, whereby given an initial state and possible set of inputs, a set of new states resulting from the input are realized. If state-transitions can be programmatically captured at runtime using XML, formal grammars such as DTD can document and assure that a program meets prescribed specifications.