Amanda Galtman, whose book on the XSpec testing framework will be published by XML Press this winter, will be presenting a tutorial at Declarative Amsterdam 2026 (November 12-13, 2026). Declarative Amsterdam is an annual conference focusing on the technologies and methods used for declarative programming and declarative data.
Amanda’s talk, titled Introduction to XSpec, will be held on Thursday, November 12 2026 at 3pm CET (2pm GMT). Here is the abstract for her tutorial:
This tutorial will introduce you to XSpec, the open-source framework for testing XSLT, XQuery, Schematron, and XProc. As an attendee, you should have experience with at least one of the 4 supported languages, but you do not need prior experience with XSpec.
In this tutorial, I’ll explain what XSpec is and why one might want to use it. I’ll show how to run an XSpec test at the command line or in Oxygen XML Editor, enabling you to follow along with demos and do exercises. After describing the language-independent high-level procedure for writing tests, I’ll construct example tests for all 4 supported languages. These example demonstrations will include ways to express your data/documents to use during testing, multiple ways to express what you want the test to verify, and how to interpret the test report. A few short exercises will enable you to practice, hands on.
