Review / Revise the Conformance Program

[RASakach]

Current program is not meeting expectations.

1. Extenders are not motivated to participate; the project is missing out on understanding the wider use of Zowe
2. Those that do participate are not seeing value
3. Consumers do not leverage the landscape
4. Time consuming to generate / maintain the conformance checklist
5. Conformance validation is manual (no automated tests)

Let's brainstorm and consider alternatives to

1. help extenders to achieve interoperability with major versions of Zowe
2. showcase the available extensions
3. reduce the overhead in upkeep
4. Ideally, offer a testing framework

[RASakach]

Where should we invest? We should consider:

1. Automated testing (maybe, this could be very challenging and expensive to build); we don't have the infrastructure for this
2. Maintaining the Community-maintained checklist for the clients, drop them for the server & post the checklist in a new "conformance" section in Zowedocs
3. Server side: drop the conformance "stamp"; include a section in Zowedocs that describes any changes required for interoperability
4. Badge: develop a smaller "stamp" that can be applied to conformant client extensions and showcased at their respective marketplace (VSC Marketplace, NPM)

What should we do with remaining extensible components that do NOT currently have a conformance program?

1. Explorer for IntelliJ
2. Client SDKs