Fwd: pls tell stories, be engaging, be brief

QAWG --

Please give opinions about this suggested last-minute change to OpsGL.  (It 
is "editorial".)  Do you like the idea or not?

Today Dan Connolly wrote to the QAIG list...

At 09:49 AM 8/29/03 -0500, Dan Connolly wrote:
>[...]
>
>I suggest the QA ops guidelines start by telling two stories:
>
>   Project A did all their spec work assuming they'd
>   do testing and QA later. The spec was finished
>   in 9 months, but early adopters moaned and groaned
>   about the ambiguities in the spec and the marketplace
>   was rife with confusion. It wasn't until 3 years
>   later that folks were motivated to develop a test
>   suite. The technology was eventually deployed, because
>   it was very much needed; but not gracefully at all.
>
>   Project B did test driven development from the start.
>   The spec and test materials took 18 months to develop,
>   but by the time they went to REC, they had 4 interoperable
>   implementations; two of which passed all the test and
>   two of which were successful commercial products.
>   Developers raved about the ability to use the test
>   materials in their development, and to give feedback
>   on the design before it froze. The user community was
>   able to use the test materials to objectively point
>   out defects in the commercial products, allowing them
>   to be fixed straightforwardly in point releases.
>   9 months after the spec went to REC, the marketplace
>   of interoperable implementations was so well established
>   that the technology became ubiquitous, and everybody
>   wanted to be part of the W3C process where the next
>   new technology was developed.

Do you like this idea?  It would comprise a new sub-section at the start of 
the introduction [1].

[1] http://www.w3.org/QA/WG/2003/08/qaframe-ops-20030905#introduction

(Btw, I think David's suggested addendum to Project A would be good.)

-Lofton.

P.S.  Fyi and for context, we are considering splitting the GL documents in 
the style of many of the W3C standards:  the first HTML file has Title page 
down through TOC.  And then the remaining chapters are split amongst a 
handful of HTML files.  E.g.,

** Introduction might be the second file.
** Guidelines third.
** And the rest fourth (Conformance, Terminology, References, Change 
history, other).

There would also be an alternative single-HTML-file version (non-normative) 
referenced from the cover page.
#####

Received on Friday, 29 August 2003 18:39:24 UTC