The Tallis Tester is a tool for testing and debugging the logic of a developed PROforma application, or “process-description”.

The Tester keeps track of which tasks need to be performed to advance the process, and provides information regarding the current state of the process. It can also receive messages indicating that certain tasks have been completed, or that data relevant to the running of the process has been provided.

The Tallis Tester is used in the authoring process, and is not intended for clinical use. It differs from the web enactment interface in some respects:

• User interface modifications such as customised web pages do not appear in the Tallis Tester.
• As the Web Enactment is based around a sequential set of web pages (rather than a set of interactive panels as in the Tester) there are certain other minor differences in the runtime behaviour (most notably concerning the relationship between sources and enquiries).

Tallis Tester is a stand-alone application, which can be launched from Tallis Composer. When a process-description is submitted to the Tallis Tester, it is first checked for syntactic and basic semantic errors; If no errors are found, the Tallis Tester is launched, and the process-description is enacted.

The process-description is displayed in a tree view, similar to the one in Tallis Composer. The colours of the tasks change during the enactment, as they represent task states.

Once the PROforma application is tested and debugged, it can be enacted over the web using the Tallis Engine.