RE: misuse of "conformance testing"?

On Fri, 2007-03-02 at 22:33 +0100, Hausenblas, Michael wrote:
> Dan,
>  
> Thank you for this hint. I have to admit that I am 
> not sure 100% by myself; especially regarding QA issues, 
> I'm always open to learn, though.
>  
> Now, IMHO our intention was to create something like
> a conformance test, viz. defining test assertions on
> which one can test if her implementation _does_ conform
> to RDFa.

That's a *very* high bar. I wonder if you really mean
to meet it. I'm sure you mean to make a test suite that
can help to find lots of ways that an implementation
does *not* conform. But do you really mean for the
test suite to serve as a *complete* specification
of the language, such that the *only* way to pass
all the tests is to build a conforming implementation?

Look at it this way: if I just build a piece of
software that hard-codes all the answers to the
tests, it will pass all the tests, right? But
it won't actually do anything useful for inputs
other than the ones in the test suite.



>  This is the focus of the Test Suite rather than
> i14y, performance, etc.
>  
> In case you've got some better terminology, let us know ;)

Just call it a test suite. And say that it's purposes
are
 (a) to clarify issues that come up during the specification
development and
 (b) to assist with test-driven development of implementations.


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

Received on Friday, 2 March 2007 21:53:01 UTC