Change Results.tool (single object) element to Results.tools (object set)

[dickdeutsch]

I'd like to suggest that the CTRF spec be revised such that the Results.tool single object changes to a Results.tools set of Tool objects.
For context:

• There's been a merge request opened on my ctrf-rs Rust reporter repo to allow variability in the name assigned to a Tool object. While it makes sense that my implementation should allow for a Tool with an arbitrary name, I'd also like to be able to pre-populate a set of Tools by default with one instance for my ctrf-rs library while allowing the addition of further instances.
• More generally, I can say as a professional software engineer that there are numerous scenarios in which I'll use multiple tools to solve a given problem at hand. I'd like to be able to list any applicable, not just one, in reports that I generate and use in the course of testing activities.

[Ma11hewThomas]

Hey @dickdeutsch, thank you for building ctrf-rs and for taking the time to raise this.

The spec has:

• generatedBy (root) Identifies the tool, framework, or system that produced this CTRF document.
• results.tool Identifies the tool, framework, or system that produced the test results.

In your case, I believe generatedBy should be ctrf-rs and results.tool should be the specialised test-runner

That split has felt useful so far, especially to keep the semantics of results.tool clear and predictable for consumers.

And so I think your approach of allowing flexibility in tool naming is the right move.

I do agree with you that there are many instances that involve more than one tool to produce results, and that being able to acknowledge that is valuable. I’m just not fully convinced yet what the right shape for that is, I’d like to think a bit more about how to do it without either over-complicating the spec or breaking existing consumers.

Really appreciate you engaging on this, let’s keep the discussion open for further thought and feedback