The stability of the CrossGrid production testbed is extremely important for development of the CrossGrid tools and applications. It is virtually impossible to develop complex applications and tools when the basis for these developments is unstable. In the case of CrossGrid the basis is provided by the Grid middleware and by the sites that comprise the production testbed. Problems in any of these components can render the testbed unstable and therefore useless for the users and application developers.

CrossGrid also aims to extend the Grid technologies coverage to new countries where it was previously unavailable, therefore the deployment of a near production quality infrastructure is essential to attract users and foment new opportunities for further technological developments.

In order to achieve these goals the CrossGrid work package 4 (International testbed organisation) contains a task dedicated to testbed verification and quality control. The objective of this task is to ensure that the CrossGrid production testbed conforms to the quality levels that characterize a testbed production service. This is achieved through:

• Validation of the middleware and corresponding documentation.
• Validation of sites after each new middleware installation.
• Monitoring of the testbed.

Validation and quality control can be considered as the last step of the quality assurance process where the final verification is performed to verify that the products are compliant with their specifications and perform according to the requirements. The verification and quality control does not interfere with the middleware development process that is handled inside the corresponding development work packages or external projects (such as Globus and EDG), however it provides feedback to the developers on the quality of the middleware and on the improvements that might be required.

The main goal of the testbed verification and quality control is to make sure that the services provided by the testbed are reliable, dependable and conformant therefore providing a stable base for the application and tools development.

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