One month on the QA mailing lists
January, 2004

About the QA Mailing-lists monthly summary

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"MonthinQA" is a monthly summary of the main topics discussed on www-qa@w3.org, the public mailing-list of W3C QA Interest Group and www-qa-wg@w3.org, the public mailing-list of W3C's QA Working Group.

The regular editor for this resource is Lynne Rosenthal, NIST, co-chair of the QA Interest Group.

See also the initial calendar and initial requirements for this resource.

Topics for this period

Wanted: Guest Topics

As part of the QA WG’s effort to learn more about QA activities in other W3C Working Groups as well as external organizations, guests will be invited to participate in a QA WG telecom to share what they are doing. Guests are not limited to only W3C Working or Interest Group members. If you are developing QA practices, tests, tools, or have something to share – we would like to learn more. So far, topics included: the use of profiles/levels/modules in W3C specs (by Karl Dubost) and OWL and RDF test results (by Sandro Hawke). Contact: qa-chairs@w3.org if you have a guest topic to share.

OWL and RDF Core Test Results

Sandro Hawke presented the OWL and RDF Test Results work sharing with the QA WG how the WebOnt (and to a lesser extent RDF Core) used public test results to monitor and guide implementations, get through CR, the software/systems architecture used and test driven development. Using RDF, the test results ontology provides information about each test. The tests cases, which are approved by the WG, serve as examples of correct usage of OWL as well as illustration of issue resolutions. The test cases are normative, but are not considered conformance tests. Many thanks to Sandro for making us aware of this work. The discussion and references are available at:

Discussion and references

3 Approaches to building tests

Tests are built to help achieve quality goals. They need to be usable and useful. It seems that WGs are building tests

prior to writing the specification – WebOnt and RDF Core build tests to explore issues and drive the specification,
while writing the specification – CSS authors write the tests as they write the specification,
after the specification is drafted – the more traditional model, DOM, SVG, XML Core and others have written the tests when the specification is in WD or CR.

There is no best approach, all these and any combination of them work – by directly contributing to the quality of the recommendations.

A good read

Tim Berners-Lee's Essentials of a Specification; a short piece on writing a clear specification. There are many similarities with the QA WG's Specification Guideline.

QA Activity News

The QA Activity was renewed and will continue to pursue its mission of improving the internal work done at W3C.
Congratulations to Dom Hazaël-Massieux, the new QA Lead
. The nextface-to-face meeting is scheduled for 1-2 March 2004 in Mandelieu, France during the Technical Plenary Meeting. Please contact the chairs if you wish to attend. See logistics and agenda for more information on the Technical Plenary, and the specific meeting page for the QA face-to-face meeting.

Meeting minutes

All meeting minutes are available at: http://www.w3.org/QA/Agenda/

One month on the QA mailing lists January, 2004