QA Guidelines/Checkpoints

The recent

 QA Framework: Process & Operational Guidelines
 http://www.w3.org/QA/WG/qaframe-ops.html

uses a guideline approach to present its requirements.

I think this is a good idea, but I think we should try to follow the
"regular" way of writing guidelines oriented documents that the WAI
(http://www.w3.org/WAI/) has developed over the years.

The important thing to understand is that the checkpoints are the real
meat, and the guidelines are just a way to organize them in themes.

The checkpoints are the units carrying the priority, and they are the
items from which conformance claims (to a level) are derived. They
defines the requirements and their importance.

That's about it for the must-do before release clean up.

One simple way of doing that is to replace all the requirements
labeled Guideline in the document with a Checkpoint label and remove
the duplicates, that is, the ones that were just introductory to other
checkpoints.


Some less important details on using priority 1,2,3 or just verbs.

In the three WAI guidelines, priorities are set using a number scheme:
P1 for MUST, P2 for SHOULD and P3 for MAY. This is a convenient way of
representing the importance of requirements, particularly for WAI
where the target audience of each guidelines is unique (the page
author or a tool). For the QA guidelines, since the target may vary
depending on the checkpoint (WG, TS, charter) and has to be mentioned
somewhere as the subject of the requirements, it may be easier to
simply use the RFC 2119 verbiage MUST, etc. Need some discussions.

e.g today we have QA requirements expressed as
  Working Groups should consider completion and publication of
  significant test materials to be a criterion for CR-exit and
  PR-entrance. 

  Working Group charters should address goals and plans for
  test suites and tools. 

and we'd have to have something like

  Consider completion and publication of significant test materials to
  be a criterion for CR-exit and PR-entrance. [P2]

  Address goals and plans for test suites and tools in WG charters. [P2]

Note that the term "Working Group", as the target of the requirement,
is gone from the checkpoint. One way to still using the numbering
priority scheme would be to organize Guidelines by target audience:
Working group, Test Suite, etc. so that the target would be infered
from the Guideline context (but it's also good when checkpoint stands
alone..).

Received on Monday, 7 January 2002 07:47:09 UTC