TPAC/2012/agile W3C Process Agility
Abstract: Beginning at TPAC 2011, the Advisory Board (and many others)have observed that specification development is often lengthy. The question arose as to whether the W3C Process was part of this problem. The Advisory Board (with much help from many W3C contributors) has looked at this over the past year. The role of this breakout session is to present the AB's proposed actions (see the slides below) and to get comments, both on the actions themselves and what actions are missing.
Summary: Many of the comments were requests for clarification. In particular, that "overlapping PR with CR" would not (typically) lead to additional AC ballots if a specification re-enters CR; and that "encouraging testing" means providing the testing approach at Last Call and a plan for testing at Candidate Recommendation. In addition, the recommendation to increase the use of modularization generated a larger number of documents that people outside the WG (and, in particular Horizontal WGs) need to track. There was a request for a mechanism that would help facilitate that tracking. Some suggestions included having regular meet ups between a WG and the relevant Horizontal WGs and/or having each WG publish a dashboard that identifies the status of the documents that the WG owns. It was also noted that having a place to track inter-WG issues that is outside either WG's tracking and visible to the relevant Domain Manager.