Testing systems before putting them into production is key to ensuring reliable interoperability. Even with standards in place that define the interactions between systems, there are possibilities for errors in implementation, variances in interpretation, and shortcomings of the standards that may result in systems that do not reliably interoperate. Therefore, it is common practice to test systems' interoperability before putting them into production.

Standards organizations and third parties are responding to the need for interoperability testing with testing specifications and tools that validate implementations of those standards. OASIS ebXML Implementation, Interoperability, and Conformance Technical Committee (IIC) released a base line set of interoperability tests for ebMS specifications and several organizations have sponsored interoperability testing among vendors that have implemented ebXML. Significant testing for ebXML interoperability has been conducted by Drummond Group Inc. and Drake Certivo eBusiness Test Center; the result of such testing has provided a baseline for interoperability of implementations of ebXML. Similarly, testing of web services specifications for interoperability has been conducted during the development of specifications, and WS-I has developed and released a testing suite for WS-I profiles.

These efforts provide a baseline for validating interoperability that organizations can build upon with their own pre-production testing.

The STAR Transport Guidelines are an implementation of the Web services or ebXML standards and build upon the testing specifications, tools, and interoperability tests that are already in the industry. The best practices for implementation of STAR Transport Guidelines is to first refer to the results of testing for interoperability that vendors have published through the independent testing efforts. Next conduct testing for specific implementations for conformance to STAR standards. Finally, validate the systems with each other before putting them in to production.