Test Suites

As part of the process of defining a new standard, it is recognised good practice to define a test suite to go along with the specification. The principle reason for having a test suite of course is to allow implementers to check that their implementations correctly interpret the definitions in the specification. However, users of implementations can gain confidence in the implementation they use by seeing the results from the test suite. And finally, it is useful for the specification writers themselves: by forcing them to think of test examples, it can expose corners of the specification that have not yet been sufficiently well defined.