Re: How do we test a specification?

Thanks Lynne and David for your answers, if people want to suggest  
more things feel free.

It shows really the importance of [QA Specifications Guidelines][1]  
as a tool to write a specification. By knowing what you want to  
address, it helps to really trim the work of testing.

[Defining class of products][2] is very helpful to be able to define  
what will be the requirements of each features in terms of  
implementations.

[[[
class of products
     The generic name for the group of products or services that  
would implement, for the same purpose, the specification, (i.e.,  
target of the specification). A specification may identify several  
classes of products.
]]] - http://www.w3.org/TR/qaframe-spec/#cop-def

To make it a little bit clearer, if we define a markup language like  
HTML 4.01 or XHTML 2.0. Classes of products for this language would be

* User agents:
     - for humans: Voice Browsers, Braille readers, Graphical browsers.
     - for machines: Search Engine indexing, Semantic Analyzers, etc.
* Authoring tools

and certainly more categories. Defining this list helps to define  
what has to be tested and how to design the individual test cases  
depending on the requirements.

For example, one caveat that we often notice in W3C specifications,  
and many specifications addressing formats markup out there, is the  
lack of requirements for authoring documents. Some people might  
consider that it's out of scope.





[1]: http://www.w3.org/TR/qaframe-spec/
[2]: http://www.w3.org/TR/qaframe-spec/#implement-principle
[3]: http://www.w3.org/TR/qaframe-spec/#cop-def

-- 
Karl Dubost - http://www.w3.org/People/karl/
W3C Conformance Manager
*** Be Strict To Be Cool ***

Received on Monday, 31 October 2005 16:28:16 UTC