QA Framework: Operational Guidelines

W3C Candidate Recommendation 22 September 2003

This version:

http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/CR-qaframe-ops-20030922/

Latest version:

http://www.w3.org/TR/qaframe-ops/

Previous version:

http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/CR-qaframe-ops-20030912/

Editors:

Lofton Henderson (lofton@rockynet.com)

Dominique Hazaël-Massieux (dom@w3.org)

Lynne Rosenthal (lsr@nist.gov)

Kirill Gavrylyuk (kirillg@microsoft.com)

Contributors:

See Acknowledgments.

This document is also available in this non-normative format: single HTML file.

Copyright © 2003 W3C ^® (MIT, ERCIM, Keio), All Rights Reserved. W3C liability, trademark, document use and software licensing rules apply.

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Abstract

A common operational framework for building conformance test materials for W3C specifications is defined. It presents operational and procedural guidelines for groups undertaking conformance materials development. This document is one of the QA Framework family of documents of the Quality Assurance (QA) Activity, which includes the other existing or in-progress specifications: Introduction; Specification Guidelines; and, Test Guidelines.

Status of this document

This section describes the status of this document at the time of its publication. Other documents may supersede this document. A list of current W3C publications and the latest revision of this technical report can be found in the W3C technical reports index at http://www.w3.org/TR/.

This document is a W3C Candidate Recommendation ( CR), made available by the W3C Quality Assurance (QA) Activity for discussion by W3C members and other interested parties. For more information about the QA Activity, please see the QA Activity statement.

The QA Working Group has made changes and improvements in response to Last Call comments, as documented in Change History. At a high level, the normative requirements of the guidelines and checkpoints are substantially the same. However, much of the text has been edited for clarity and simplicity. New structuring and CSS styling have been applied to all of the guidelines and checkpoints.

The QA Working Group resolved to seek transition of Operational Guidelines to Candidate Recommendation (CR) in order to gather trial application experience from the W3C Working Groups. To allow time to gather experience, the QAWG does not expect to request to advance this document to Proposed Recommendation status sooner than six months from now (27 February 2004, just before the W3C Technical Plenary). Feedback from the Working Groups will be incorporated, used to update the preliminary implementation report, and the further processing of Operational Guidelines will be decided.

The QAWG expects to show two implementations of each checkpoint in "QA Framework Operational Guidelines" before requesting to advance to Proposed Recommendation status. The Working Group has agreed to amend its PR entrance criteria to include Priority 3 checkpoints, which is the only difference with the version of this document published on September 12.

Publication as a Candidate Recommendation does not imply endorsement by the W3C Membership. This is a draft document and may be updated, replaced or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to cite this document as other than work in progress.

The QA Working Group Patent Disclosure page contains details on known patents related to this specification, in conformance with W3C policy requirements.

You may email comments on this document to www-qa@w3.org, the publicly archived list of the QA Interest Group [QAIG]. Please note that comments that you make will be publicly archived and available, do not send information you would not want to see distributed, such as private data.

Table of contents

1. Introduction
   • 1.1. Document overview
   • 1.2. Scope and goals
   • 1.3. Class of product and audience
   • 1.4. Motivation and expected benefits
   • 1.5. Relationship to other specifications
   • 1.6. Understanding this document
   • 1.7. Checklists to assess conformance
   • 1.8. Checkpoint priorities
   • 1.9. A chronological view of the guidelines
   • 1.10. Usage of terminology in this document
   • 1.11. Use cases
2. Guidelines
   • Guideline 1. Commit to Quality Assurance in Working Group activities.
   • Guideline 2. Commit to resource level for Working Group QA activities.
   • Guideline 3. Synchronize QA activities with the specification milestones.
   • Guideline 4. Define the QA process.
   • Guideline 5. Plan test materials development.
   • Guideline 6. Plan test materials publication.
   • Guideline 7. Plan the transfer of test materials to W3C if needed.
   • Guideline 8. Plan for test materials maintenance.
3. WG relationship to QA Activity
4. Conformance
   • 4.1. Normative parts
   • 4.2. Extensibility
   • 4.3. Conformance requirements & test assertions
   • 4.4. Checkpoint priority definitions
   • 4.5. Conformance definition
   • 4.6. Conformance claims
   • 4.7. Conformance disclaimer
5. Acknowledgments
6. References
   • 2.1. Normative references
   • 2.2. Informative references
7. Change history

Two separate appendices to this document [OPS-CHECKLIST] and [OPS-ICS] present all checkpoints in a tabular form sorted in their original order and sorted by their priorities, for convenient reference. The latter is an Implementation Conformance Statement (ICS) pro forma for this specification.