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Scheduling consensus can be challenging. In this environment where many people volunteer their time, and there are many competing priorities, strong project management plays an important role. It helps achieve results within a narrow market window, keep participants motivated, and make the best use of resources.

Use cases, requirements, and tests

  • Start by compiling stories and use cases
  • Base requirements on them
  • Determine a clear scope (what's in and what will be in the next version)
  • Write specifications to satisfy those requirements using testable statements.
    • There is a spectrum and some specifications lend themselves readily to testable statements while others do not.
  • Develop a test suite based on those statements.
    • The test cases will help resolve ambiguities in the specification, and will help achieve software interoperability.

Challenging questions

Developing a W3C specification involves a number of questions that can be challenging to answer and that affect timing:

  • Do we have all the right stakeholders in this group?
  • How long will it take to agree on requirements? What should be in and what should be postponed to the next revision?
  • How long will it take to write a specification that fulfills those requirements?
  • How much review will be get? How long will it take to handle the review comments?
  • How long will it take to create a test suite?
  • The W3C Process sets expectations about implementability. What is the right metric for the

specification we are working on? If the metric is 2 interoperable implementations, how long will we need to achieve that?