Resource Ownership

An organization must own the Test Groups and the Categorization that the Conformance Suite uses:

Test Groups

Conformance Suites can be composed of one to three test groups. These test groups need to be owned by the organization that owns the suite.

The organization that’s creating the suite and uploading a test group is the one that owns the suite and test group, respectively.

This constraint is imposed by Touchstone to avoid unintentional impact on the conformance results of a program when the Test Group owner modifies the test scripts and fixtures in the test group. Such modifications will increment the Conformance Suite version and can drastically change the conformance results of test systems.

Categorizations

Categorization is required for suites that are composed of more than one test group. The Categorization itself needs to be owned by the organization that’s creating the suite. This is again to avoid unintentional impact on the conformance results of a program when the Categorization owner modifies the categorization. Such modifications will increment the Conformance Suite version and can drastically change the conformance results of test systems.

Please refer to Categorizations for more information

What about Anchor Systems?

Anchor systems are needed to achieve comparable Conformance results among SUTs. If a suite uses different Anchor Systems, then the results would not be meaningful.

• If the suite is a Server suite, then the Anchor System will be a Client system that all Server SUTs will use for test executions so conformance results would be consistent in the suite.

• If the suite is a Client suite, then the Anchor System will be a Server system that all Client SUTs will use for test executions so conformance results would be consistent in the suite.

Anchor systems must be accessible by the organization that’s creating the suite. Although anchor systems do affect the conformance results, Touchstone does not require organizations to own the anchor systems in order to select them as part of their suites. This exception has been made because anchor systems are difficult to provision (as opposed to test groups and categorizations).

It is highly recommended though to use reliable anchor systems for your suites. This is to avoid unintended consequences on the program’s conformance testing if the anchor system is deleted or its behavior is modified by the owning organization.

You can learn more about client anchor systems here and here.

You can learn more about server anchor systems here and here.