Re: Test suites and RFC2119

On Sun, Jul 10, 2011 at 3:59 PM, Charles McCathieNevile
<chaals@opera.com> wrote:
> Privacy and security restrictions leap to mind. There are things that really
> are "should" requirements because there are valid use cases for not applying
> them, and no reason to break those cases by making the requirement a "must".
> In the normal case where they are applied you want to be able to test.

Were you thinking of specific examples?  I can't think of any offhand.

> But the difference between "should" and "must" is already two sets of
> conformance profiles (or whatever you want to call it), where one applies
> always and the other applies unless there's a reason not to do the thing
> that is assumed to be normal.

The difference is that if you have "must" requirements that are
specific to a single conformance class, you can write a test suite and
expect every implementation in that class to pass it.  For "should"
requirements, you're saying it's okay to violate it, so test suites
don't make a lot of sense.

Received on Sunday, 10 July 2011 20:35:54 UTC