Limitation of Traditional Approaches
Historically, the core of the compliance validation process has been embodied by the architecture validation suite, a suite of tests designed to check all the compliance aspects of the implementation. Numerous test suites are commercially available, primarily for architectures other than Power. Typically huge in size, these test suites do not provide a clear quality guarantee. Their main attraction is that they have been used in several design processes. However, their lack of defined coverage measurement renders them of little benefit as a compliance measure. Another major problem with using test cases for compliance validation is that any change in the architecture requires a review and modification of the whole, potentially huge, set of tests.