Certification Authority

Test Harness

Compliance FAQ

Compliance/Certification Testing

Products may be developed to support one or more versions of the SIF Implementation Specification and/or related specifications. The Schools Interoperability Framework Assocation makes this online test harness available for both informal compliance testing against a variety of product standards/test suites and for formal certification testing when an organization wishes to market its product(s) as "SIF Certified."

SIF Association members may freely use this test harness to informally self-test the compliance of their products. SIF Association members and non-members alike that wish to formally certify their products must register with the SIF Certification Authority to begin the formal certification process.

Certification Authority

The SIF Certification Authority formally documents the entire SIF Certification process. That documentation should be read and understood before beginning Certification Testing.

As far as the test harness is concerned, the SIF Certification Authority plays three roles:

  • It supplies a Conformance Statement Questionnaire (CSQ) that when completed is called a Conformance Statement. The CSQ collects information on the organization submitting a product for testing and contains a series of questions regarding the supported SIF functionality in the product being tested. When the CSQ is completed, the resulting Conformance Statement is used to configure test sessions, both in compliance and formal certification testing.
  • In certification testing the Certification Authority ultimately accepts test session results along with a Conformance Statement. After accepting these results, the Certification Authority begins formally certifying the results as "SIF Certified" or not.

Test Harness

The Test Harness is available for use by SIF Association members . SIF Association members may access the test harness by entering their SIF Association membership username and password.

The test harness uses claims regarding SIF functionality in a product from a completed Conformance Questionnaire, or Conformance Statement, to configure a test session that tests those claims and to establish evidence of compliance. Upon submission of a Conformance Statement, the test harness:

  • Examines the product claims and generates a suite of tests that the product needs to complete.
  • Creates any necessary SIF Zones or Agents for the product to communicate with.
  • Creates a set of any SIF objects that might be required for testing.

At that point the test session is ready for product testing. The product either automatically or under user control performs whatever application functionality is required to completed the generated test suite. Depending on the product standard/test suite the test harness may automatically generate SIF messages to aid in completing testing, or user controls may be provided to manually generate any SIF messages needed to fulfill generated tests.

When an organization feels a test session is complete, the user controlling the test session ends the test session and a summary of the test session is presented to the user. For test suites where certification is offered, the user is also presented with the option to submit the test session results along with the submitted Conformance Statement to the SIF Certification Authority. Once submitted, the SIF Certification Authority formally certifies the results.

Further information or help on any steps in the test harness should be available on any pages the user encounters.