ISO/TR 23697:2011 can be applied to textiles and textile products and is concerned only with test methods which operate in a continuous scale to yield a single numerical figure as the test result. However, this single figure can be the outcome of a calculation from a set of measurements.

The distribution of test results is required to be unimodal and is assumed to be normal. With non-Gaussian distributions, other evaluation procedures will be necessary.

It does not cover methods which yield discrete values, "pass/fail" (go/no go) type results, (accept/reject) tests or where a ranking scheme is in operation.