The second edition of ISO 16845-1 standardizes the conformance test plan for Classical CAN and CAN FD implementations. Many carmakers request from chipmakers to test their implementations by independent test houses. The test plan released in 2016 has been implemented already. First CAN FD implementations are currently under test.

Experts of ISO TC22 SC31 WG3 have found one test case, which needs to be improved. The test case specified in sub-clause 7.6.10 (REC increment on CRC error) needs some more elementary tests and some elementary tests require some description improvements. Due to the fact that ISO standards cannot be updated easily, the addressed issue has been solved unofficially. The change request will be submitted as soon as a systematic review is scheduled. In the meantime, the proposed improvement is available on the CiA website, for example (download it here).

Conformance testing is like spellchecking in human communication. It just guarantees that the implementation-under-test is compliant to the related standard. It does not proof interoperability. Like in human communication, a correctly written message regarding spelling of words and use of grammar rules may be misunderstood or misinterpreted by the reader. On the other hand, a receiver could understand properly a not correctly written message. This means, we need additional interoperability tests. This could be done by means of plugfests or testing implementations in a “golden” system.