AW: misuse of "conformance testing"?

Dan,

> A conformance test suite serves as both necessary and 
> sufficient conditions.

Karl, other QA gods, do you agree? 

> But for typical W3C interoperability specs, 
> a "conformance test suite" is an absurd notion indeed. 

I am relieved to hear that the RDFa Test Suite is not
alone in its evilness ;) I think I have to contemplate
on that one; will be discussed at upcoming RDFnHTML TF
telecon ...

Cheers,
	Michael 

----------------------------------------------------------
 Michael Hausenblas, MSc.
 Institute of Information Systems & Information Management
 JOANNEUM RESEARCH Forschungsgesellschaft mbH
 Steyrergasse 17, A-8010 Graz, AUSTRIA
---------------------------------------------------------- 

> -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
> Von: Dan Connolly [mailto:connolly@w3.org] 
> Gesendet: Samstag, 03. März 2007 15:47
> An: Hausenblas, Michael
> Cc: www-qa@w3.org; public-rdf-in-xhtml-tf@w3.org
> Betreff: RE: misuse of "conformance testing"?
> 
> On Sat, 2007-03-03 at 13:39 +0100, Hausenblas, Michael wrote:
> > [...] the TS is a set of  necessary, but not necessary and 
> sufficient 
> > conditions.
> 
> 
> > ... as far as I understand it - conformance testing (in 
> finite time) 
> > wouldn't be possible at all ;)
> 
> For open data formats/protocols, indeed, conformance testing 
> is quite impractical.
> 
> "Conformance testing" makes the most sense for physical 
> standards like "must withstand 20 lbs of force", and when 
> some conformance testing lab is the very definition of what 
> the standard means, like "UL listed".
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underwriters_Laboratories
> 
> I suppose there are some cases when conformance testing makes 
> sense for software; I think device drivers can be "Microsoft 
> certified" or something if (and only if) Microsoft's 
> certification labs checks them out.
> 

> 
> --
> Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
> D3C2 887B 0F92 6005 C541  0875 0F91 96DE 6E52 C29E
> 
>

Received on Saturday, 3 March 2007 19:27:18 UTC