We are very pleased to announce that EWP is equipping itself with conformance testing capabilities, which amounts to the most significant upgrade of its quality control processes since 2021. This new automated service is called Talos.
Talos’ chief role is to help ensure as smooth a roll-out as possible for new functionalities in the EWP Network, starting with nominations. All nodes wishing to support this functionality will be required to successfully pass the respective conformance tests.
As before, the EWP Consortium will continue to maintain an authoritative source of which providers are able to support which services via EWP: this list can be found here and will continue to be updated into the future.
The introduction of Talos will gradually supersede the technical testing processes that were introduced in 2021 under difficult circumstances. This upgrade had already been announced in 2022, but it was not until 2025 that its development was finally green-lit. We are very thankful to DG DIGIT for their support and excellent cooperation – Talos stands on the shoulders of giants, insofar as it’s built on the Interoperability Test Bed (ITB) developed and operated by DG DIGIT.
Like all IT tools, Talos is expected to improve over time, even though it’s already a major step up from the processes currently used. During the first months of the roll-out of the nominations functionality the EWP Consortium will be paying to particular attention to the significance of the testing results, assessing whether adjustments may be required on an ongoing basis.
It’s important to highlight Talos also amounts to an important step forward for all development teams in EWP. Having an automated testing tool will mean not just greater reliability but also more flexibility, which will hopefully reduce the time required to make new functionalities available. It will also make it simpler to retest prior to deploying major updates on local software versions, ensuring new versions remain compliant – an issue which at times has affected the user experience for the clients of some systems.
Moving forward, Talos’ capabilities will be further extended to also support conformance testing for EWP transcripts of records.