SIP-030 — Tool and Technology Neutrality

Go to Annex C: Requirements

The conformance requirements SHALL NOT require a specific modeling language, transport framework, or vendor tooling environment.

Conformance to SIP-RA must depend on satisfaction of its architectural requirements rather than on the technology or commercial tool used to describe, implement, transport, or evaluate a conforming realization.

Requiring a specific modeling language, transport framework, or vendor environment would unnecessarily restrict implementation choices and could prevent otherwise conforming realizations from demonstrating equivalent architectural behavior and Evidence.

The Submission satisfies this requirement when the conformance Model:

1. Defines conformance in terms of architectural obligations and observable Evidence
2. Avoids requiring an implementation to use the modeling language used to specify SIP-RA
3. Avoids requiring a particular transport or message-exchange framework
4. Avoids requiring a proprietary or vendor-specific tool
5. Permits equivalent Evidence to be produced using different conforming tools and technologies
6. Distinguishes normative information requirements from a particular representation or tooling environment
7. Supports evaluation of different implementations against the same conformance criteria
8. Identifies any required interchange formats separately from the tools used to create or process them

SIP-002 — Formal Platform Independent Model requires the Submission to include a formal Platform Independent Model. SIP-030 does not prevent the RFP or resulting specification from selecting a standard language for expressing that normative Model.

The distinction is between the language used to specify SIP-RA and the technologies that a conforming implementation must use. A conforming implementation should not be required to use the specification-authoring tool or internal modeling environment.

This requirement does not prohibit standard, implementation-independent interchange formats needed to exchange or evaluate required conformance information.