Implementation Plan & Report for the QA Specification Guidelines

Introduction

This document explains what is our plan to conduct a successful CR phase for the QA Specification Guidelines and to gather the experience on implementations of these guidelines.

Existing implementations

The checkpoints in the Specification Guidelines are derived from practical experience as specification authors and from experience gathered by studying existing W3C specifications, their pitfalls and good practices, as shown in the Examples and Techniques document. In addition, the QA WG has had a pro-active role by making and contributing reviews of documents based on the specification guidelines to Working Groups on some of their recent specifications.

Examples of interaction between the QA WG and other Working Groups:

the HTML WG has released a new version of XHTML Print recently. A review of XHTML Print has been made by Karl Dubost which shows that they are very close of level A for Spec GL (minor details) and that they could achieve level AA, easily without major problems.
the DI WG integrated a number of comments on CC/PP following a review done by Lynne Rosenthal, and esp. created a very complete conformance section, re-using the terms defined in SpecGL
the OWL WG integrated some of the comments made in a review made by Karl on their LC; they refused some of them, and we're trying to work with them to see how we can work together on this.
no feedback received yet on the CSS3 UI LC WD review done by Karl, nor on the XPath2.0 Functions & Operators LC WD review done by David Marston (these documents have not been republished since the review)
the XML Protocol WG incorporated a conformance section in its Attachment Feature document, following a review made by Kirill Gavrylyuk on an early version of SpecGL

Besides these interactions with current working groups, reviews on existing recommendations show that at least UAAG1.0 is very close to being AAA conformant to specGL, the main obstacles from being so are based on terminology differences (which specGL enforces on some cases, to ensure a consistent terminology across W3C specifications).

During the CR phase, the QA WG will provide here a complete implementation report for all checkpoints of SpecGL.

Schedule and strategy

We would like by the end of the announced CR period, the 4th Technical Plenary in March 2004, to have at least 5 WGs (try to) implement this CR and provide us with feedback on the utility of the document and their experience in implementing it.

In order to achieve that, we will use various means:

explain the purpose of the CR to the W3C staff during their domain calls, and try to identify a QA contact per domain (fallback is the domain leader)
promote the guidelines at a chairs meeting
contacting directly, thru the W3C WGs staff contacts, a series of WG that would be good candidate for this phase, and assist them (by attending some of their meetings, teleconf or f2f) into applying the guidelines to their specifications (as already done for e.g. CC/PP).

Some people have shown already their interests for these guidelines : WCAG WG and GEO WG. Karl Dubost will join the WCAG F2F to establish an implementation strategy. We also have decided at the last QA WG F2F in Boulder, Colorado, to target the 1st WD of WG. When a 1st WD has been published, someone from the QA WG will approach the WG of the newly published document and promote Spec Guidelines to encourage them to use these guidelines.

Note that this Implementation plan is related but different in nature than the CR exit criteria we have put in the SpecGL status section (which is that all the checkpoints be implemented twice).