Here an overview about what is coming next on AV-Comparatives:
- some more single product tests will be released during next 2 months
- the retrospective test (which will be released the 1st December) will be slightly changed/improved further. Some vendors where already suggesting some test method changes since about a half year and as those methods are a) for us easier to do than we did so far, b) seems to be widely accepted also from other vendors and c) should not change much anyway, this new “methods” will be used in this upcoming retrospective test. The changes etc. will be described in the report. At least for this retrospective test, the level-ranges will remain unchanged I think. If needed, they will be adapted next year.
- the summary report of 2007 will be released during December, containing a brief summary of all tests and some notes about the various products.
- in January we will release a report stating how much garbage was still included in the test-set of August 2007 and which impact it had on the results (the awards given). This will allow us to prove that the few garbage did not had any major impact on the results and will also give to the single vendors which claim that there is lot of garbage the opportunity to report and show how much garbage is in the tests. As the August test contained a huge amount of new samples (more than in any other our tests), it will be interesting to see how much garbage slipped thru our automated and manual analysis.
- In 2008 we will probably start to ask for some kind of fees for the various services we provide and we will probably drop out some vendors from the regular tests and include some other vendors instead which are more known and often asked to be included. The number of tested products will probably be limited to 16-18 products.
- Behavioral-Testing is getting more and more important. There are currently discussions to find the best (vendor-independent) practice for such kind of tests and how testers can perform such tests. As such tests are not trivial and require lot of resources it may take a while until we do them.
- If manpower and resources permits, we would like to do from time to time also other tests showing how well products protect against malicious actions in some various scenarios. But first we will continue to focus on keeping and improving further the quality and methods of the current tests.