Software testing can be performed at three levels.  Successive levels of testing provide increasing assurance that two applications will interoperate seamlessly.

• Compliance Testing – Compliance testing is performed to assess whether the software meets the requirements of a standard or specification.  Note that the more “flexible” or general the standard, the more likely that two products, tested as “compliant” to the standard may still require customization in order to interoperable smoothly. This type of testing was the first type done by the NRECA-approved MultiSpeak testing laboratory on products submitted from a single vendor for compliance with MultiSpeak Versions 1.1 and 2.2.

• Interoperability Testing – Interoperability tests are typically performed between pairs of software applications to ensure that they work as nearly seamlessly as possible together.  The MultiSpeak Initiative has performed interoperability testing since 2005 on software meeting the requirements of Versions 3.0 and 4.x.

• Site Conformance Testing – Site conformance tests are performed at an individual utility site to ensure that pairs of products interoperate seamlessly given the utility’s specific data structures and application data.  Even if two software applications have passed both compliance and interoperability testing, it is still possible that choices of data structure made by a specific utility or poor quality data stored in one of the applications may result in interface errors.  Such errors may require work on the part of the software vendors or data scrubbing on the part of the utility.  The MultiSpeak Initiative does not perform nor sponsor conformance testing.