Minimum required conformance class for compliance certification

[ghobona]

Currently we rely on Chapter 2 of Standards documents (titled Conformance) to state in natural language which conformance classes are the minimum required for an implementation to be certified as compliant to a Standard.

It would be great if such a property was declared in some structured way through ModSpec elements.

For example if we had a specification element of type "Document", it could have an attribute named "basicConformanceClasses" or "mandatoryConformanceClasses". The attribute would accept an array of strings that reference conformance classes.

NOTE: TEAM Engine uses a configuration of this form to identify mandatory conformance classes: <BasicConformanceClasses><conformanceClass>Core</conformanceClass></BasicConformanceClasses>

[cmheazel]

We should wait on this a bit. If we are going to make broader use of Conformance Modules, our whole approach to conformance testing may need to be re-worked.

[cmheazel]

I have to wonder if our whole concept of a standard is archaic. In CITE we test for conformance with a Conformance Class. We do not test for conformance with a "standard" as a whole. The Standard is simply an artifact of how the Conformance Classes are packaged. This is most evident in our Web API Standards where the "mandatory" Conformance Classes are often defined in other Standards.

What we have is a dependency tree. Conformance Testing requires you to traverse up the tree until you identify all root nodes. The resulting sub-tree(s) identify all of the Conformance Classes you need to test against.