Patent ID: 7543058

Claim:
A method for facilitating compliance testing in an environment, comprising: defining components for compliance testing as a set of attribute values pairs represented as configuration items; defining relationships between the components; storing the component definitions and the relationship definitions in a searchable database; defining Configuration Standards for the configuration items, the Configuration Standards comprised of scope and restrictions, the scope identifying configuration items to which the Configuration Standards apply, the restrictions defining requirements for compliance to the Configuration Standards; wherein the scope, for the Configuration Standards, comprises: scope search strings, which are configured to identify the configuration items via a scope search string search; scope links, which are configured to link to the configuration items for identifying the configuration items; and configuration items list, which is configured to identify the configuration items therein; wherein the restrictions, for the Configuration Standards, comprise: a restriction search string, which is configured to identify the requirements in terms of attributes and relationships for compliance via a restriction search string search; configuration instance restriction, which is configured to identify requirements for compliance based on attributes and relationships of a configuration instance; and configuration items standard instance, which is configured to identify requirements for compliance based on attributes and relationships of a created object; storing the Configuration Standards in the database; and performing compliance testing for components against a selected Configuration Standards, the performance compliance comprising: determining, depending on the scope and the restrictions of each of the selected Configuration Standards, which of the components within the scope of the selected Configuration Standards fails to meet the restrictions of the selected Configuration Standards; and outputting results as a list, wherein the list comprises each of the components that failed to meet the selected Configuration Standards.