Proposed outline of the evolution of the QA Framework

Summary of the issue: 
It wouldn't make much sense to have the QA Framework be promoted to a
W3C Recommendation, since it only or mostly concerns W3C internal
functioning. Provided that it will finish as a set of Notes, how do we
want these notes to be used and especially enforced. 

Summary of yesterday discussions: 
After some discussion, we agreed that in their final state, the various
specifications should define required level of commitments to the
objects they apply, namely: 
- QA-OPS: should probably be an addendum to the Process Document (maybe
like the pubrules) 
- QA-SPEC: probably referenced by the pubrules (like the WCAG) 
- QA-Test: ? Hard to say, no document yet. 

The level of commitment for each of these spec has not yet be defined
(probably level A). The process to have them be required is yet to be
explored, probably by the staff contacts. 

We agreed also that we could not enforce requirement on non measurable
guidelines, which means that we should aim to have at least all our
priority 1 check points be easily quantifiable. 

Outline of the various status of the QA Framework status: 
While we don't aim to produce Recommendations, It is expected that our
document will follow the Recommendation track progress as follow: 
- we push a document in WD in Last Call when we feel it's stable enough
for review by the other working groups. Note that the operational
guidelines might require a review by the Advisory Board (owner of the
process document) and/or by the W3C Management Team. 
- after integrating last call comments, we would use the stage of
Candidate Recommendation as an implementation phase: the idea would be
to require that each WG applies the GL and sends us the resulting
report; note that the requirement would *not* to comply with the GL,
only to use them. This would have the double benefit to allow them to
have a QA approach to their work and us to have some real life feedback
on ours. It has yet to be defined how such a requirement could be
obtained and applied. 
- depending on how the candidate recommendation is successful, we would
go back to Last Call WD or finalize the document as a Note. Once a Note,
the document would define a minimum level of compliance as explained
above. 

This would be a 2 stages process: first stage, the WGs would be required
to use the GL; second stage, the WGs would be required to comply with
them. This is not a very orthodox evolution in the W3C Process, but
then, our documents aren't very classic either. 

Whatever the consensus we reach on this issue, the resulting idea should
probably be explained in the introduction document and detailed for each
specific part of the framework. 

Comments and corrections are welcome. 

Dom 
-- 
Dominique Hazaël-Massieux - http://www.w3.org/People/Dom/
W3C/INRIA
mailto:dom@w3.org

Received on Friday, 14 June 2002 09:05:07 UTC