"Month in QA" is a monthly summary of the main topics discussed on www-qa@w3.org, the public mailing-list of W3C QA Interest Group, www-qa-wg@w3.org, the public mailing-list of W3C's QA Working Group, as well as other news related to the Quality Assurance activity at W3C.
The regular editor for "Month in QA" is Lynne Rosenthal, NIST, co-chair of the QA Interest Group.
See also the initial calendar and initial requirements for this resource.
Using markup to identify the conformance requirements in a specification, makes it easier to review its contents, get traceability from tests into the Recomendation, and evalute test suites. Relevant information can be extracted using an XSLT. Dom Hazael-Massieux did this for XInclude, making his review of the document easier to do. You can look at this example as well as 2 others (QA and Web Arch) that Dom has built to extract information from documents.
Many of the successful testing efforts created a Testing Process document, early in the effort, to capture both the logistics and technical information related to building and using the tests. The document identifies how things are going to work - ownership and copyrite information on both submitted and published materials, test desciption dtd or schema, evaluation criteria, and the more mundane, mail lists, issues lists, faq, etc. The key is to put all the information in one place, so that it can be found. Discussion and for examples of Testing Process documents and test description files:
A discussion on schema quality and schema limitations raised several questions including how do you check that the formal language (schema, dtd) matches the English-written specification? When a defining a language (e.g., XHTML) where some requirements are defined in prose and others in a formal language, there may be overlap between the 2 approaches. This can lead to contraditions and mismatches between the two. A Wiki has been started to further this discussion.
All meeting minutes are available at: http://www.w3.org/QA/Agenda/
