The test suite for Boost.TR1 is relatively lightweight; tests have been added to the Boost.Config test suite for each new configuration macro, and each TR1 component has a very short concept check test added. The concept test programs are designed only to verify that all the TR1 components that are supposed to be in namespace std::tr1 are indeed present and have standards conforming interfaces. There are a few test programs (those which end in the suffix "_tricky") which do not currently compile with the Boost.TR1 implementation, because the relevant Boost libraries have not yet implemented the features tested; hopefully these incompatibilities will be removed in future releases.

The concept tests do not take account of compiler defects (quite deliberately so); the intent is that the tests can be used to verify conformance with the standard, both for Boost code, and for third party implementations. Consequently very many of these tests are known to fail with older compilers. This should not be taken as evidence that these compilers can not be used at all with Boost.TR1, simply that there are features missing that make those compilers non-conforming.

Full runtime tests for TR1 components are not in general part of this test suite, however, it is hoped that the Boost.TR1 component authors will make their regular test suites compile with the standards conforming headers as well as the Boost-specific ones. This will allow these tests to be used against the standard library's own TR1 implementation as well as the Boost one.