Quality Assurance

NIST works with industry to provide guidance on conformance topics, including how to specify conformance and communicate requirements for claiming conformance in specifications, as well as how to develop conformance test suites and tools. The primary goal is to improve the quality of specifications and resulting implementations.

NIST co-chairs the W3C QA Interest Group and participates on the QA Working group. The objective is to solidify and extend quality practices regarding specification and test suite development by providing a set of guidelines. The list of Guidelines is available from the W3C and includes:

Operational Guidelines: operational and procedural steps for undertaking conformance materials development.
Specification Guidelines: how to write clearer, more implementable, and better testable specifications.
Test Guidelines: production of high quality, reliable, automatable test suites and tools.

Although written for the W3C, these Guidelines can be applied to any organization developing specifications and conformance test materials

NIST leads the OASIS Conformance Technical Committee (TC), which provides a central source of information about conformance and conformance related topics. A committee specification entitled "Conformance Requirements for Specifications" was produced, describing how to specify software conformance and identifying the conformance requirements to be included and addressed in specifications. This document is available from the OASIS.

Note: These links takes you off the NIST site

Downloads

NIST XML Query Test (Zip file)

W3C/NIST XML Tests (Zip file)

W3C/NIST XInclude Tests (Zip file)

NIST Schema Tests (Zip file) (HTML)

XSL-FO Tests (Zip file)

XSLT/XPath Tests (Zip file)

W3C/NIST DOM Level1 Tests (Zip file)

NIST Standards Roadmap