The standardization of inter-laboratory results of germination test of forest species seeds requires that the methods be robust. Therefore, the objective was to compare and discuss, through the coefficient of variation for normal seedlings, the variabilities present in the process of validation methods obtained in the germination test for seeds of 20 species of the family Fabaceae. Coefficients of variation for the experiment by lot and by laboratory were calculated for normal seedlings from the statistical analysis of method validations. For normal seedlings of 20 Brazilian forest species, the coefficients of variation are low (up to 9.84%), to average (up to 17.66%), contrary to expectations due to high genetic variability in these barely improved species. The increase of the coefficient is not related to treatment for breaking dormancy, but it grows as the lot quality decreases. The high coefficients by laboratory, overestimated by the lot effect, are uniform indicating that the methods are repeatable. The coefficient is not an indicator capable of predicting the heterogeneity of model variance. As normal distribution models random events, randomness is present in the validation process of the 20 forest species of the Fabaceae family.
dormancy; statistical assumptions; forest seeds; data transformation; experimental variability