Activity/Charters comments

Daniel (et al),

We talked about activity/charters renewal some at this weeks telecon 
[1].  You might find some useful stuff in those draft minutes.

I have two specific action items to raise questions about (on QAWG list, 
for discussion, especially on the second one), both in QAWG charter.

1st:
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QAWG charter, Scope ([1]), 1st bullet.  We don't understand what the second 
part of the bullet means:   "optionally can work on specification 
improvement, but this is not a required deliverable".  Is this somehow 
different from spec improvement that would result from the spec reviews of 
the first part of the bullet?

2nd:
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QAWG charter, Scope ([1]), last bullet:  " refinement of the a QAPD 
?"  We're unsure what "QAPD" refers to.  There are two possibilities, and I 
think you probably mean #2 (that's what OpsGL would require of us):

1.) QAWG's generic WG process document (QAWGPD).  We worked on this a bit 
at Boston f2f, but never quite finished it.  Things like procedures for 
raising issues, re-opening closed issues, etc.  Stuff that isn't otherwise 
defined in W3C Process document.

2.) QAWG's QA Process Document (QAWG-QAPD).  Peter and Patrick worked on 
this at the end of Boston meeting and made a draft.  They started from 
OpsGL's QAPD template, and generated lotsa good comments for improvements 
to that.  They also raised the issue, "what are QAWG's test materials", 
which we discussed at Crete.

But when reading it, I started to have a problem, which confirms an 
observation of Peter's:  it gets very tricky and confusing, talking about 
"the QA of QA"  (or more precisely, the QA of QAWG).

In theory, we think we understand it well enough now to sort out the level 
of recursion and comply with OpsGL's requirements that we have a QAPD.  But 
in reality, it looks pretty worthless to anyone outside of QAWG, much less 
to QAWG members.

That said, it doesn't look good to try to say, "it doesn't apply to us" -- 
the immediate reply is, "eat your own dogfood".  Okay, we can do that.  But 
after trying to read and understand QAWG-QAPD, and trying to sort out how 
to improve it ... I think we should do it, and quitely bury it somewhere 
obscure on our web site.  And it ought to have a Caveat at the start 
(apologies if meta-QA is not simply understood.)

Other thoughts?

-Lofton.

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-qa-wg/2003Aug/0007.html
[2] http://www.w3.org/QA/WG/charter200307.html#Scope

Received on Wednesday, 6 August 2003 18:34:56 UTC