[Accessibility] conformance testing

[George Kraft]

During yesterday's accessibility conference call conformance testing 
was briefly mentioned.  I would like to make the distinction between
Functional Verification Testing (FVT) which is often what a developer 
does to ensure a software product is working as designed, and 
Conformance Testing which is what is done for a product to measure 
compliance to a written specification.

http://lsbbook.gforge.freestandards.org/test-expand.html

The LSB uses the Open Group's TET/VSXgen framework to code conformance 
tests which follow the POSIX test methodology.  Tests can "pass" in one
of six shades (pass, warning, fip, unsupported, not in use, untested), 
or tests can "fail" in one of four shades (fail, uninitiated unresolved,
unreported).

http://www.linuxbase.org/test/lsb-runtime-test-faq.html#FIPS

Two of the FSG workgroup's (LSB and OpenI18N) use the TET/VSXgen
framework.  There is a learning curve to use and write TET style
conformance tests; however, the functionality pays off in the end.

The purpose of this note was not to start an in depth discussion
thread, but rather give some background information so people
can start thinking about how to conformance test the AT-SPI API.

Best regards,

-- 
George Kraft IV                       IBM Emerging Technologies
gk4 at austin.ibm.com                    http://www.ibm.com/software/  

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