COE Witnessed Testing Guidelines
May 2003
Revision 1.0
As part of its COE Platform Certification services, The Open Group offers Witnessed Testing. Witnessed Testing consists of self-testing partly witnessed on-site by staff from The Open Group. Witnessed Testing is required when requesting Specific Platform certification, and is optional for Product Family certification.
Vendors selecting Witnessed Testing should be familiar with the process described in the “Guide to COE Platform Certification”.
Witnessed testing should be considered the last step in the Specific Platform Certification process. As such, the witness testing should not begin until the vendor has successfully completed all the necessary steps to submit its certification. A prerequisite is that the system under test has completed a full submission for a Product Family certification with all issues resolved. This explicitly includes:
Selecting the Witness Test option when submitting the Test Campaign Definition form
Completion of all required tests
Completion of all manual test procedures
Resolution of all Interpretation Requests
Submission of all documentation, including the "Template Setup Procedures for a COE Validation Cell "
Submission of all Indicators of Compliance
Completion of the Audit of submitted materials by The Open Group with the result deemed acceptable for Product Family Certification
Once these criteria have been met, the vendor should contact The Open Group to schedule a site visit to witness the testing. During this visit, certifying vendors should expect to:
Demonstrate successful runs of the manual testing procedures
Review Indicators of Compliance identified in the vendors COE Platform Test Campaign Definition
Demonstrate the validity of all TIN’s and TSD’s relevant to the certification in the specific test environment subject to certification. (all such TIN’s and TSD’s must be approved in advance of the site visit.)
Once successful results have been demonstrated to the witness from The Open Group, the vendor will receive a report from The Open Group documenting their successful testing for inclusion with their submission.
The Witnessed Testing option includes 10 working days of on-site witnessing of vendor certification testing.
Vendors who in the sole opinion of the auditor(s) have been unable to resolve any apparent non compliances against the indications of compliance during that time will be considered to have failed and will need to re-contract for a new Witnessed Testing session at additional cost after resolving the problems found during the testing and re-submitting the updated indicators of compliance.
Vendors who in the sole opinion of the auditor(s) have been unable to complete the required set of demonstrations during the allotted time will be considered to have failed to complete the platform specific certification, and will need to schedule a further ten-day visit at additional cost in order that the certification may be completed. The subsequent visit will not normally require the rerun of any demonstrations successfully completed in a previous visit unless the build of the platform under test has changed. There is no limit to the number of such subsequent visits that can take place, but it is anticipated that a maximum of three visits should suffice for a cooperative vendor who is fully prepared for the certification activity. Vendors are strongly encouraged not to schedule a Witnessed Testing session until they are confident that they can complete the testing without problems.
While the decisions of the auditor(s) are at their sole opinion and are deemed to be final and binding, for the avoidance of doubt the appeals process defined in the Trade Mark License Agreement is applicable to all on site activities.
Version 1.0 dated May 2003