W3C

The QA Handbook

W3C Working Group Note xx August 2005

This version:
http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/NOTE-qa-handbook-200508xx/
Latest version:
http://www.w3.org/TR/qa-handbook/
Previous version:
http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/NOTE-qa-handbook-20041122/
Editor:
Lofton Henderson
Contributors:
See Acknowledgments.

Abstract

The QA Handbook (QAH) is a non-normative handbook about the process and operational aspects of certain quality assurance practices of W3C's Working Groups, with particular focus on testability and test topics. It is intended for Working Group chairs and team contacts. It aims to help them to avoid known pitfalls and benefit from experiences gathered from the W3C Working Groups themselves. It provides techniques, tools, and templates that should facilitate and accelerate their work. This document is one of the QA Framework (QAF) family of documents of the Quality Assurance (QA) Activity. QAF includes the other in-progress specification, Specification Guidelines, plus a handful of test- and other QA-related notes, advanced topics, and Wiki page collections.

Status of this document

This section needs to be updated when minor editing is done.

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 Working Group Note, made available by the QA Working Group of 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.

This is the third publication of this document, and the first as a Working Group Note. Further development and publication is anticipated. Interested parties are asked to submit examples of the Guidelines and Good Practices, for inclusion in future versions. The development of the templates linked from this document will be finished. The QA Handbook will continue to be coordinated with the other parts of the QA Framework.

Publication as a Working Group Note 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.

Comments on this document are welcome, and may be emailed to www-qa@w3.org, the publicly archived list of the QA Interest Group. Please note that your comments will be publicly archived and available, do not send information that should not be distributed, such as private data.

Table of contents

  1. Introduction & roadmap
  2. Early planning and commitment
  3. Day-to-day QA operations
  4. Licensing & branding
  5. Acquiring test materials
  6. Acknowledgments
  7. References
  8. Change History

List of Guidelines and Good Practices:

This document has two separate external appendices, QA Process Document template and Charter template, which contain templates to help Working Group Chairs and Staff Contacts to implement the document's good practice guidelines.


1. Introduction & roadmap

1.1. Five simple stories

The following five use cases for The QA Handbook (QAH), told as stories, show when and how QAH could be helpful. They cover five different situations that might typically arise over the life of the Working Group.

The QA Handbook could be useful to Chairs and Staff Contacts at Charter time...


The Charter-drafting team of a new Working Group, led by Staff Contacts and co-Chairs, looks through The QA Handbook. Following the good practices in the early-commitment and planning module, the team debates how much it can realistically commit to at this early stage. After deciding on some test materials deliverables, milestones, and specification synchronization that it considers to be safe commitments, the team uses the provided Charter Template to include these in the draft Charter.

Or it could help a Chair who is trying to jump-start a test suite project...


An existing Working Group has just finished writing its Requirements and Use Cases documents, and has begun to draft its specification. At the same time, it is taking a first look at its test suite plans. As recommended in the The QA Handbook, the Chair jump starts the Test Suite project by appointing a point of contact and part-time Test Suite team, whose first output is a quick QA Process Document (QAPD) using the provided QAPD template.

Or maybe the Chairs and Staff Contacts are pondering the transfer of a test suite from an external entity...


A Working Group has re-chartered to finish a Second Edition of its specification, and to develop the next functional version. The group did not develop a test suite during its first charter, but a collaboration of outside organizations and an industry consortium has developed one. The Chair and Staff Contacts have negotiated an agreement in principle to transfer the test suite to a stable home in W3C. In The QA Handbook, they find a handy checklist of preliminary steps, requirements, and specific activities for a smooth transfer.

Or maybe they need to take preemptive action due to looming possible license-issue hassles...


A Working Group is almost ready to request Candidate Recommendation (CR), and has gotten a comprehensive test suite together for the CR's trial implementation period. As the Chair starts to arrange for publication of the test suite, she finds the Working Group split on which test suite distribution licenses to use. Consulting The QA Handbook, she finds discussion of the pros and cons of the W3C licenses (the Software License and the Document License), and advice on devising an optimal licensing strategy.

Or maybe they can borrow the experience of other W3C Working Groups for various useful and common test suite processes...


A Working Group has built and released a basic test suite for its specification. A Staff Contact has been given the Action Item to plan its expansion to a more comprehensive test suite, by leveraging and integrating the large test collections of several early implementors. Rather than figure out the issues and write a Test Contribution & Review process from scratch, he looks at the summary advice in The QA Handbook. QAH points him both to some useful templates, and to more detailed stuff in collected test-guidance Wiki pages [TEST-GUIDE], significantly shortening his effort to complete his action item.

1.2. Why QAH?

Chairs and Staff Contacts are overworked. They share a lot of the same concerns and pressures as specification editors (see 2.1, "Specification editors").

Common problems include:

A lot of groups have faced these issues. As a result, there is a growing body of experience in W3C about what works and what doesn't. QAH aims to pull this together.

1.3. Audience and purpose

The QA Handbook (QAH) is intended for: Chairs and Staff Contacts of W3C Working Groups. These include both the process-savvy as well as the novices.

QAH is a practical guide about applying good practices and quality assurance techniques to WG activities, especially developing Recommendations and test materials. It flags avoidable pitfalls, and provides techniques, tools, and templates that will facilitate and accelerate the work of the groups. Guidance in QAH is supported by real-world stories and examples.

There is no normative content in QAH, therefore conformance to QAH is not an issue. QAH takes this approach because:

Advice is presented in the imperative voice as Guidelines and Good Practices. Guidelines tend to be general or high level encapsulations of a given topic area, and good practices tend to be more low-level, actionable details.

These suggestions will generally be helpful and enhance the quality of the work of a Working Group. However, each suggestion should be applied or not depending on the specific situation of the WG.

1.4. QAH scope

The QA Handbook (QAH) is a non-normative handbook for integrating quality assurance techniques and good practices into the Working Group. It focuses especially on factors affecting development and implementation of specifications and tests, including:

Better specifications and effective test development are emphasized goals in QAH and its companion documents. In support of those goals, the scope of QAH goes beyond a narrow focus on authoring topics, and touches on many aspects of the broader context in which Working Groups operate -- from writing charters, to the logistics of managing the group's quality practices, to interacting with other groups and the public, to completion and maintenance of the Working Group's deliverables.

1.5. Other QA Framework resources

The QA Handbook belongs to a document family collectively called the QA Framework. The other parts of the QA Framework are:

Editors, test builders, and W3C members in general, in addition to Chairs and Staff Contacts, will find advice specific to their roles in these other framework parts. The Primer provides a brief orientation to the whole QA Framework.

Other valuable documents about quality assurance techniques and good practices are indexed by the QA Activity, outside of the QA Framework.

1.6. Roadmap to the rest of QAH

After this orientation section, QAH contains four topical modules:

Each presents advice and guidance about tasks that contribute to the WG's realization of quality specifications and tests. These tend to have a chronological correspondence to phases (rec-track stages) of its activities. Earlier is better, but later is better than never.


2. Early planning and commitment

The Xyz Working Group launched an intense test effort late in its specification development. During Candidate Recommendation (CR), the still-growing Test Suite kept flushing out ambiguities and flaws in the specification. Xyz10 cycled multiple times in CR, in part because of (beneficial!) changes from the test suite/specification-revision iteration. For Xyz20, the group decided up front that any functionality proposed for inclusion had to be accompanied by test cases.

Guideline 1: Plan & commit early. Plan for and commit to the Working Group's test and other quality-related deliverables as early as possible.

Why care?It's not always easy to anticipate Working Group needs during the rush and pressure of Chartering, or in the busyness of early Working Group life. But the earlier the group can accurately identify and commit to its test and other quality related deliverables, the less likely it is that the WG will get major surprises later on, or run into problems that will delay its progress towards Recommendation.

Additional reason — binding decisions about participation (e.g., numbers per company) often are made at Charter time.

What does it mean? In practice, this means attention to a handful of points, which we enumerate in the following series of Good Practices.

Good Practice 1: Decide as soon as possible — will the Working Group build test materials or acquire them?

Why care? Clearly, it is going to make a big difference in a Working Group's staffing requirements — building test materials tends to be labor intensive (extremely so for some types of specifications). Even if the group imports them, some resources will have to be applied (see the final module). The particular test-related activities and milestones in its program of work will in general be completely different for build versus acquire options.

Good Practice 2: Think about and enumerate the quality-related deliverables that might help the Working Group through the Recommendation track.

What does it mean?Minimally, the Working Group should commit to assuring the timely existence of test materials. Test materials provide for the evaluation of an implementation against the requirements of a specification and/or provide information about the implementation. Conformance Test Materials are test materials that are used to indicate conformance of an implementation to a specification. Note that all test materials are not conformance test materials. For example, some Working Groups using a test-driven specification development process emphasize tests of new, changed, or contentious functionality.

Test Materials include:

Quality-related deliverables include:

Test materials are by far the most common quality-related deliverable, and likely will be a key to quick and painless passage through Candidate Recommendation (CR).

Good Practice 3: Synchronize quality-related deliverables and their development milestones with specification milestones.

What does it mean? This advice echoes that in Tips for Getting to Recommendation Faster [REC-TIPS] for example see item #6 in section 2. Quality related deliverables include especially test materials, but could include as well such other items as are enumerated above.

Good Practice 4: Consider whether the Working Group should bind any quality criteria to Rec-track advancement.

What does it mean? For example, finishing test materials deliverables before requesting Candidate Recommendation (CR) is important, in order to facilitate CR's Implementation Assessment. (Counter-example: as in the above Story, if the group is still building them during CR, it is likely to uncover things that will oblige it to cycle in CR.)

This good practice takes the synchronization of deliverables of the previous Good Practice a step further — the specification may not advance unless the committed test or other quality criteria are met.

Good Practice 5: Put some thought into how to staff the Working Group's test and other quality assurance plans.

Why care?The earlier this is done, the more options will be available. Charter-time staffing provisions of W3C Process, by the way, provide another good reason to put some thought into test suite plans and other quality-related deliverables as early as possible.

What does it mean?Some options include:

The third option is not really different from the first. It's just a way of doing it. But notice that it's an option that is only available by looking into these questions at Charter time.

By the way, there has been confusion about "W3C Process only allows each company to have two participants on the Working Group". In fact, that is not from W3C Process. W3C Process gives considerable freedom for this to be tailored to Working Group needs — W3C Process says it may be specified in the Charter. So, for example, the group could decide on these rules: allow two per company in technical discussion, issue resolution, voting, etc; and, allow additional dedicated test suite builders.

Tips for Getting to Recommendation Faster [REC-TIPS] (section 3) also talks some about the value of (early) staffing decisions.

Techniques

3. Day-to-day QA operations

After doing it up front in one of its first test materials development efforts, a test development team was so convinced of the value of a good QA Process Document that, in its several subsequent W3C test development efforts, one of the first things it did was copy-paste-edit a previous instance of such a process document for the new effort.

Guideline 2: Document QA processes. In one place, collect all of the information needed to define the Working Group's work processes, inform others how to communicate with the Working Group on test and quality topics, and direct everyone how to find and use its test and related resources.

Why care?Over and over we hear the message from successful test suite projects — define the work process early: test development framework, issues list, email list, faq, contribution & review process, etc. Conversely, there are examples of disorganized collections of test cases with no one apparently in charge, no way to find their status, or verify their correctness.

What does it mean? The W3C Process Document clearly organizes the way that a Working Group's specifications are progressed through the Rec track. But there is no similar template for the other aspects of a Working Group's life, particularly aspects related to test and other quality assurance processes — logistical setup, communications with the outside, licensing and branding policy, test development process, etc.

Examples

DOM has a thorough test suite process document referenced from its /Test/ Web page. Starting at the Test page, one finds complete information about communications and logistics, licensing, submission and acceptance procedures, test materials location, and test suite status.

Starting at the CSS /Test/ page, one quickly finds the location of CSS test materials, excellent test suite documentation for users and contributors (includes templates) alike, and an additional test authoring guidelines document. (Some operational details -- e.g., communications and licensing -- are less easily located.)

Good Practice 6: Put all of the Working Group's important test and other quality-related information in one place in a QA Process Document.

What does it mean? In practice, it means producing a QA Process Document recording at least those details of the Working Group's test and quality assurance work processes that are outlined in the template and briefly discussed in the following subsections.

Techniques

The technique is simple: Use the QA Process Document template. It will guide the user through everything needed, and then some. It is not only a template, but also a checklist of sorts, for the sort of things that the Working Group should consider having in its QA Process Document. The template has been assembled as the union of good practices seen in real QA Process Documents of W3C Working Groups.

In the past, before this template, test efforts would often copy-edit an existing process document from another effort. There is not really any reason to do this anymore. Here are some examples from which the template has been assembled:

Examples
The best example of a comprehensive QA Process Document seen so far is the DOM TS process document.
The very similar XML TS process document reflects a copy-edit by the XML TS development team (significant membership overlap with the DOM development team).

3.1. General modus operandi

See the corresponding section in the template.

Good Practice 7: Identify a Working Group point-of-contact for test materials or other quality-related business.

What does it mean? This can be a special appointed "QA point-of-contact". Or it might be the Chair (or a co-chair), or Staff Contact. The important part is that there be an identified point-of-contact to whom others can address questions, bug reports, contributions, etc, and who will be accountable for responding.

See also the QA Process Document subsection in the template.

Examples
See the already-mentioned DOM TS process document.

Good Practice 8: Specify an archived email list to use for quality-related communications.

What does it mean?It can be a dedicated "Test" list. Or it can be a public Interest Group list. Or it can be a public comment list separate from the Working Group list, in the case that there isn't an Interest Group. Because of the variety of public/private mixes amongst W3C's Working Groups, "one size fits all" does not work well here.

The list should be available for all quality-related topics, including test suite questions, bug reports, contributions, etc.

See also the corresponding QA Process Document subsection in the template.

Examples
The XML /Test/ page identifies a public mail list for test topics (public-xml-testsuite@w3.org).
The SVG test pages identify a public test-topics mail list (svg-testsuite-comments@w3.org) prominently at the beginning.

Good Practice 9: Identify Web page(s) for test suites, announcements, and other quality-related topics.

What does it mean?Obviously, this needs to be publicly accessible. Doing it all in the public portion of the Working Group's Web space is one way to achieve that. In particular, that provides a good, secure repository location for test materials.

Some groups, for example SVG, have two locations — a private CVS repository for the in-development test materials, and a simplified public location for periodic public releases of test materials.

Techniques

Link the test pages from the Working Group's home page, and use the common convention of putting them in the /Test/ directory under the Working Group's home page.

See also the corresponding QA Process Document subsection in the template.

The Working Group's QA Process Document is also a handy central location to record its licensing policies and (any) branding policies. These are sufficiently important that they have their own QAH module, which addresses:

Examples
SVG uses a helpful convention for its test suite pages -- the URL is the SVG home page URL (http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/) with /Test/ appended. Additionally, the test page is prominently linked from the SVG home page.
The XML test pages follow the same useful convention -- their location is a /Test/ directory under the WG home page.

3.2. Test development framework and processes

If the Working Group itself is developing test materials, then there are several topics associated with test materials development process that are going to impact its operations and management. Useful guidance and discussion for these may be found in QA's collection of test-related Wiki pages [TEST-GUIDE]. These topics, which might conveniently be documented in the Working Group's QA Process Document (QAPD), include definitions of:

3.3. Life after Working Group — maintenance

Finally, as a part of planning about "life after Working Group", the group will need to decide what happens to both its test materials and associated processes. Discussion of maintenance-related topics may be found in QA's collection of test-related Wiki pages [TEST-GUIDE]. Again the information might conveniently be located in the group's QA Process Document:

Technique


4. Licensing & branding

Xxxxxy WG has a great collection of test cases, but they couldn't agree now on publication licenses that are acceptable to everyone, and so they were stalled indefinitely while they work it out.

Guideline 3: Resolve legal & license issues. Get agreement up front about license and any other legal issues around planned test materials.

Why care?Get it right early, or it may stall the Working Group's Rec-track progress indefinitely. While this might seem to be a routine piece of Day-to-day operations, it has proved to be sufficiently troublesome within W3C that it deserves to be a Guideline by itself.

What does it mean? There are two kinds of licensing issues: submission license, and publication license. Both of them can be problematic and can interrupt the Working Group's progress on Rec-track if not early addressed and carefully handled. Test materials license issues are the subject of ongoing debate and discussion within W3C, but there are some tactics to minimize potential problems.

Good Practice 10: As early as possible, get agreement about acceptable license terms for submission of test materials.

What does it mean?W3C now has an official set of comprehensive policies for contribution of test cases to W3C. (Formerly, it had a more or less routine submission license, Contribution of Software or Test Materials to W3C [CONTRIB], but without policy.)

By early attention, it should become clear whether any potential test sources have problems with the standard terms, before possible disputes can impact the Working Group's deliverables and schedules. There have been cases where potential submitters would not accept the standard terms.

Examples
XML Schema introduction to test collection contains a reference to contribution terms (this example pre-dates recent W3C release of more detailed policies).

Good Practice 11: As soon as the nature of the Working Group's test materials becomes clear, get agreement about license terms for publication of the test materials.

Why care?Any W3C-hosted materials must have approved license and use terms. Experience has shown that there is no single license that is appropriate for all parts of all test materials, so the Working Group needs to address this after it has come to an understanding of the structure, content, and intended use of its test materials.

What does it mean?Currently approved W3C licenses that may be applied to test materials are the Document License and the Software License. The Document License has two characteristics that are attractive for test materials:

On the other hand, there are situations in which the Document License is inappropriate, because (for example) some parts of the test materials require modification or completion in order to apply them.

The W3C Advisory Board feels (member-only link) that the Document License is the appropriate license for test cases.

That ruling notwithstanding, test materials might contain some mixture of different components: test software, test documentation, and test cases. In some cases, one license may be appropriate for some component(s) of the test materials, but another license may be better for other parts. A careful look at the test materials' composition and use cases should reveal what is the best solution.

The Working Group should consult with W3C Legal if it believes that:

Good Practice 12: Decide policy about having brands, logos, or conformance icons associated with the Working Group's test materials.

What does it mean?There are two questions that the Working Group will face. First, whether to have logos, icons, or brands associated with its test materials. If that answer is yes, then it will have to address a series issues about proper usage of the logos.

W3C Logo and Icon Usage contains a complete catalog of the logos in use within W3C. Of particular interest (related to conformance) are the logos associated with content validation (HTML, CSS, etc), Web Accessibility conformance, etc. These logos have associated issues of veracity and enforceability of conformance claims. A Working Group considering its own logo or brand will face similar issues, amongst which are:

Techniques

Two final comments about both the topics of licenses and logos/brands:

Examples
See W3C Logo and Icon Usage. It contains numerous W3C logo/icon examples.

Additional History:For those who are interested in more background and detail on the license issues, there is an extensive history:

Caveat. These legal and licensing topics have been very active within W3C. Some of these references in this present QAH version may be superseded by future, newer advice or policies.


5. Acquiring test materials

An external organization built a test suite for ABC 1.0. The ABC Working Group had no test suite, no effort in progress, and no resources to staff a from-scratch effort. The external organization had no resources to continue maintaining the test suite. With a QA task-force moderating, several months of sorting the details led to a win-win agreement to transfer the ABC 1.0 test suite to the ABC working group. The test suite got a secure repository within W3C, was published for public use, and was given adequate maintenance resources.

Guideline 4: Consider acquiring test materials. The Working Group can save lots of time and work by acquiring a test suite, but be ready to address and resolve many of the same issues as build-your-own scenarios.

What does it mean? The three main problems are:

The license and human resources issues are similar in concept to what the Working Group faces when building test materials, but probably lesser in degree. A pre-transfer quality assessment might seem unique to the acquire option, but the actual steps will probably look similar to a test case contribution/review process in a build-your-own scenario.

Good Practice 13: Do a quality assessment of proposed test materials before going any further.

What does it mean?Basic things that a good quality assessment might cover would for example include:

A more comprehensive list of things that an assessment process could add to that basic list:

Examples
The SVG test suite manual contains a chapter listing test review guidelines.
Some of the CSS test authoring guidelines could also be turned around and used as assessment criteria.

Good Practice 14: Ensure there are enough human resources to support the transferred test materials.

What does it mean?A test materials manager (possibly one of the job functions of the QA point of contact) is still needed, but total human resources ought to be considerably less than build-your-own scenarios. With luck, the original manager of the external test materials source might become a participant in the Working Group after the test materials are transferred.

Good Practice 15: Sort out licensing issues with the external party that produced the test materials.

Techniques

The following is a virtualization of an actual transfer scenario that QA helped to moderate. It could serve as a checklist of steps to consider for Working Group's taking the acquire route.

Legend: EG the external group or entity; QAWG the QA Working Group; TM the test materials; WG the Working Group acquiring the test materials.

  1. Before the transfer, WG with the help of QAWG:
    • performs an assessment of the quality of candidate test materials (by WG, QAWG)
    • identifies and commits to a set of test-related deliverables from the candidate test materials. These could be: releases, appeal/challenge processes, maintenance plan, submission/review process, Web site, mail list, etc. (by WG)
    • identifies sufficient staffing, including at least a test materials manager. Recommendation: recruit the test materials manager from the EG (if one exists) to become a WG participant after the transfer. (by WG)
    • makes the decision to seek/accept the transfer. (by WG)
    • (potentially) initiates Charter amendment (by WG, QAWG may consult), if the test materials acquisition doesn't fit within the current Charter.
  2. During the transfer:
    • EG and W3C reach agreement to transfer the test materials (by WG, QAWG, EG)
    • WG and EG perform the actual transfer of the test materials, WG creates an initial repository (by WG, EG)
  3. After transfer, initial test development/framework process setup:
    • WG appoints a test materials manager.
    • The test materials manager creates a QA Process Document for WG (by WG, test materials manager, QAWG may consult)
    • set up the test materials home page, a test materials issues mailing list (by WG, test materials manager)
    • determine the appropriate W3C publication license (by WG, QAWG)
  4. First W3C public release of the new test materials:
    • make any needed enhancements prior to the first public release: fix known/reported errors, produce documentation (by WG), W3C license labelling, etc.
    • announce the first public release of test materials (by test materials manager, Communications Group)
    • joint W3C/EG press release (by WG, QAWG, Communications Group, EG)
  5. After the first public release, the test materials enter the maintenance phase.


7. Acknowledgments

The following QA Working Group and Interest Group participants have contributed significantly to this document:

8. References

[PROCESS]
World Wide Web Consortium Process Document, I. Jacobs, Ed., 05 February 2004, available at http://www.w3.org/2004/02/Process-20040205/ .
[CONTRIB]
Contribution of Software or Test Materials to W3C, which defines W3C-approved procedures and terms for submission of Software and Test Materials, available at http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/2002/contribution-grant-20021231 .
[PROTOCOL-WG-TS]
The XML Protocol WG has a TS process document, available at http://www.w3.org/2000/xp/Group/1/10/ts-contribution, and a contribution/submission license (example of a submission legal notice), available at http://www.w3.org/2001/10/test-materials-license.html .
[REC-TIPS]
Tips for Getting to Recommendation Faster, a public part of the (Member-only) W3C Guidebook.
[QA-GLOSSARY]
A comprehensive glossary of QA terms, maintained by the QA Working Group. (Incomplete version under construction at http://www.w3.org/QA/glossary .)
[QAF-PRIM]
QA Framework Primer & User Scenarios, an informative supplement to The QA Handbook that provides an orientation to whole QA Framework, including a primer and some user scenarios. Published as a QA note at http://www.w3.org/QA/WG/qaframe-primer .
[QAF-SPEC]
QA Framework: Specification Guidelines, Karl Dubost, L. Rosenthal, Dominique Hazaël-Massieux, Lofton Henderson, Eds., W3C Working Draft companion to this document, 22 November 2004. A light-weight revision of the previous (Candidate Recommendation) Specification Guidelines collection of documents. Latest version available at http://www.w3.org/TR/qaframe-spec/ .
[TEST-GUIDE]
A collection of discussion topics and guidance on test building and other test-related subjects is found on the test-related Wiki pages.
[QAWG]
Quality Assurance Working Group of the W3C QA Activity, which may be found at http://www.w3.org/QA/WG/ .
[VIS]
Variability in Specifications , Dominique Hazaël-Massieux, Lynne Rosenthal, W3C Working Draft 30 August 2004, http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/WD-spec-variability-20040830/ . Latest version available at http://www.w3.org/TR/spec-variability/ .
[TRANSITION]
How to Organize a Recommendation Track Transition, a part of the Member Guide (Member-only), is available at http://www.w3.org/2004/02/02-transitions .

9. Change history

2004-11-22, Third publication (WG Note)
2004-08-30, Second Published Draft
2004-05-10, First Published Working Draft
Combines the best features of the former QA Framework: Introduction and QA Framework: Operational Guidelines into a lightweight, non-normative handbook for W3C Working Group Chairs and Staff contacts.