Strategic Testing
Notes
Things to figure out:
- Email to membership about the program.
- Press release and proactive media outreach
- Brand and visual identity
- Acknowledgment of sposnors
Calendar
- 19 Apr: Presentation to Members
- Late May: start work on press release to announce Test the Web Forward (site, plans, and sponsors)
- 4 June (TENTATIVE): Press release
- Mid-June: ALA column by Tobie
Key Messages
Jeff Jaffe notes post Testing Workshop Jan 2013:
- The technical scope and breadth of the Open Web Platform has grown. We all need to contribute to greater testing of this platform.
- Part of this growth is the increase in diversity of platforms implementing the OWP. That diversity makes testing harder - further driving the need for testing.
- While the OWP is a broad architecture, industry segments are defining "profiles". Getting a crisp focus on them makes the testing more complicated.
- The diversity of these platforms on the networks of Service Providers is a huge headache. Each Service Provider today is spending a great deal of money testing devices and implementations for their network.
- The needs of Consumer Electronics Vendors and the Entertainment industry for well tested implementations is significant. Whereas traditional web users understand that parts of the web are "not perfect", there is less tolerance for that in the CE space.
- Today, each vendor and each service provider spends a great deal in testing. We will optimize these costs for the industry if the testing is done in a central place. This will make the spec tighter; implementations tighter; and drive down total costs.
- W3C, the standardization organization for the OWP is the logical place to lead the testing.
- The industry should get together to fund this work at W3C. In the end this will:
- Reduce costs
- Increase interoperability
- Increase reliability
Strategy
Two phases:
- In the first phase, we determine the cost of taking existing browser tests and converting them to the existing W3C test environment.
- In the second phase we look into enhancing this with additional tests that come from several sources (e.g. outsourcing, crowdsourcing, etc.).
Phase 1
W3C should get a sense from the browser vendors when they can answer key questions:
- are their tests available to us?
- what's the cost of converting them?
- are they willing to perform the conversions themselves.
Funding
- The first step which can begin immediately is to informally socialize with key stakeholders that there will be a proposal to fund a testing project and get a sense of whether they are supportive:
- Bryan can reach out to Service Providers, such as AT&T, FT, NTT, and others
- Mark can reach out to Comcast, Samsung, Panasonic
- The Team (Jeff, Philippe, Tobie) can reach out to W3C Members such as: Huawei, Google, Facebook, Nokia, and RIM
- The second step is to have these companies socialize the value of the testing fund (still informally) within various organizations' boards. Mark suggested that he could do some of this at DLNA; Bryan at GSMA, OMA; Team at W3C.
- The third step is to have the concrete proposal (scope and cost) being developed by the W3C testing task force.
- Once we have the concrete proposal and we see where there are supporters, we would create a specific financial "ask" for companies that would like to fund the work.
- There could be a "standard" request for funds; and some companies might want to give more as part of becoming W3C Sponsors.