Re: misuse of "conformance testing"?

* Dan Connolly wrote:
>A conformance test suite is one that's definitive, no?
>i.e. if you pass all the tests, then you conform.

The implication of what you are saying is that conformance testing of
non-trivial systems is infeasible; whatever method you use, you would
need a secondary method that verifies that the first method is correct
and complete, and then a tertiary one and so on up until the problem
becomes trivial. Under your interpretation it would specifically seem
that it is not possible to conduct automated conformance testing of
e.g. XML processors as such an automaton would be able to tell whether
an arbitrary XML processor halts for arbitary input. I do not think
this is how most people would understand the term; rather, such a test
suite is simply a collection of related conformance tests or test cases.
-- 
Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjoern@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
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Received on Monday, 5 March 2007 08:39:43 UTC