INTERNATIONAL  TELECOMMUNICATION  UNION

		     ITU-T RECOMMENDATION SUMMARY


Rec. No. : X.294

Title :	OSI conformance testing methodology and framework for protocol 
	recommendations for CCITT applications - requirements on test 
	laboratories and clients for the conformance assessment process

Study Group : VII - Data Communications Networks

Version : New

Date of adoption : 1992

Notes :	Also published as ISO/IEC 9646-5: 1991


Conformance testing requires mutual understanding and agreement 
between the test laboratory and the client. This Recommendation 
addresses the roles of both the test laboratory and the client during 
the conformance assessment process, the need to reach mutual 
agreements between them, and the requirements on each of them.

The conformance assessment process is the most visible process of 
conformance testing, where the results of test suite standardization 
are put to real use. This is also the stage at which there is 
potentially the most scope for variations to occur. As 
Recommendation X.294 is concerned with the relatively formal process 
of testing implementations, it is important that the number and 
nature of such variations is very limited. One of the major objectives 
of standardizing the conformance testing process is to achieve an 
acceptable and useful degree of comparability of results of conformance 
assessments of similar implementations. If this is to be achieved, not 
only should the same source of tests be used (i.e. as specified in 
standards), but also the methods of selecting and parameterizing these 
tests, and presenting their results, should be, to a large extent, the 
same.

Recommendation X.294 addresses the issues which should be taken into 
account, by both the test laboratory and the client, if the necessary 
consistency of conformance assessment is to be achieved. The target 
audiences for Recommendation X.294 are the test laboratories and their 
clients.

The test laboratory is responsible for conducting the conformance 
assessment of an OSI implementation at the request of a client. 
Typically, test laboratories are:

	a) organizations developing or supplying OSI implementations 
	   (first-party test laboratories);

	b) organizations willing to verify OSI implementations 
	   themselves before using them (second-party test 
	   laboratories);

	c) organizations, independent of suppliers or users of OSI 
	   implementations, whose business is the testing of such 
	   implementations (third-party test laboratories). 

Clients may be implementors or suppliers of real open systems or other 
OSI systems, who are applying for their own implementations to be 
tested. Alternatively, they may be procurers of those implementations, 
or any other interested party. The applicability of 
Recommendation X.294 is independent of the relationship between the 
client and the implementation. During the conformance assessment 
process, the client is responsible for the conformance statements 
accompanying the System Under Test (SUT) and for the configuration of 
the SUT.



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