Why QA?

• Investment in QA activities will

  • Promote better, more testable, more implementable specifications

  • Reduce the cost of developing specifications

  • Increase the quality and interoperability of implementations

  • Reduce duplication of test-development effort

• Even a small investment pays big dividends

  • DOM, SOAP, SVG, UAAG WGs (among others) have demonstrated this

Success Stories

• DOM - Conformance Test Suites Process Document

• SOAP - Assertion list

• SVG - Test suite 

• UAAG - AA conformance to Spec Guidelines

How we can help you

• We can't do your QA work for you

• We do provide guidelines and tools

• We can help avoid duplication of effort

• Use our templates, measure against our checkpoints

• Tell us what else you need 

The Seven Documents

• Introduction

  • Roadmap, primer, guide to the other documents

• Operational Guidelines 

  • Planning, logistics, operation, and maintenance of WG quality processes 

• Specification Guidelines 

  • How to write clearer, more implementable, more testable specifications 

• Test Guidelines

  • Technologies, tools, methods for writing test materials 

Spec Guidelines (think Testability)

• Scope - define the scope, identifying what needs to conform and how

• Conformance Clause - specify the conformance policy and requirements

• If you must subset - use profiles, modules, functional levels

• Extensions - specify whether and how extensions are allowed

• Tag for later use - identify testable assertions, discretionary items

• Claims - specify how conformance claims and statements are made

Test Guidelines (think Testing)

• Analyze the specification

• Declare the structure of the test suite

• Document the testing methodology

• Provide test automation and results-reporting framework

• Plan for test development & conformance testing

Operations Guidelines (think QA)

• Get Started - appoint a QA lead

• Integrate - commit to QA goals and scenario

• Staff - assess and assign appropriate staffing

• Coordinate - synchronize QA and specification deliverables

• Plan - for development, publication, maintenance

• How? - use OpsGL's charter template and process template 

Feedback & Next Steps

• What do you think of:

  • Our last-call documents?

  • Our tools and resources (Library, Matrix, Tools, ...)?

• Other feedback?

• What would you like us to do next?

  • Review your processes and specs?

  • Provide consulting services?

  • Document existing best practices?

  • Provide templates, tools, test harnesses?

• Other suggestions? 

References

• Our home pages for QA, the QA WG, and the QA IG

• The Matrix

• QA library

• Tools