While it is recognised that standardising current practice is no longer timely enough, anticipating future practice will always remain error prone. Due to ambiguities in the drafting of standards people not directly involved with their development may interpret them differently. As standards become more complex so the danger of misinterpretation becomes greater. Conformance testing services can provide a way of checking interpretation, but they are costly to set up and, therefore, expensive to use. Only where there is a clear economic benefit to the validation of products will conformance testing services be used by either system developers or system purchasers.
Conformance testing is often an inadequate solution to quality assurance.
In many cases it is very difficult to describe conformance in a way that allows useful testing. For such reasons it is not always possible to guarantee that a product that claims to conform to a particular standard does, in practice, support more than a minimal subset of the standard. Users often do not have the standards they require because they are not vociferous enough. Frequently there is seen to be a conflict of interest between a proprietary standard, developed by a vendor group, and the requirements of the end users. The conflict, either real or imagined, relates to issues of openness and information interchange.