1

Scope

1.1

This part of ISO/IEC 9646 specifies the requirements and gives guidance for the production of system-independent conformance test suites for one or more OSI specifications. In particular, it is applicable to the production of all OSI conformance testing specifications including all draft versions of such conformance testing specifications.

1.2

This part of ISO/IEC 9646 is applicable to the production of abstract test cases which check the conformance of an implementation to the relevant static and/or dynamic conformance requirements by controlling and observing protocol behaviour. The Abstract Test Methods included in this part of ISO/IEC 9646 are, in fact, capable of being used to specify any test case which can be expressed abstractly in terms of control and observation of Protocol Data Units (PDUs) and Abstract Service Primitives (ASPs). Nevertheless, for some protocols, test cases may be needed which cannot be expressed in these terms. The specification of such test cases is outside the scope of this part of ISO/IEC 9646, although the test cases may themselves need to be included in a conformance testing specification.

NOTE -

For example, some static conformance requirements related to an Application service may require testing techniques which are specific to that particular Application.

This part of ISO/IEC 9646 is applicable to the production of test suites for testing implementations of one or more adjacent protocols, whether or not these are embedded under other protocols.

1.3

The following are outside the scope of this part of ISO/IEC 9646: (a) the relationship between Abstract Test Suite (ATS) specification and Formal Description Techniques; (b) testing by means of test methods which are specific to particular applications, protocols or systems, including testing by means other than PDU exchange.

NOTE - This part of ISO/IEC 9646 applies fully to some but not all Physical layer protocols. Nevertheless, many of the concepts apply to all protocols.