4 Abbreviated terms

What this heading covers

Two abbreviations are visible in public text without the clause: QME, for quality measure element, which appears in the definition of quality measure element and in the title of Annex B, and ICT, for information and communication technology, which appears in the defined term ICT product. The rest of the clause is behind the paywall. That is a small gap for a reader and a real one for a tool: an abbreviation list is exactly the kind of thing a team transcribes by hand and gets wrong. This page does not guess. It records what is visible, says where the list stops, and gives the team a place to paste the list when the published edition arrives.

Record position: clause page 4 of 6. The heading is public; the text is not.

What the heading asks of a team

What to put in place before publication

1. Keep a local abbreviation list for the quality plan, with the expansion and the source of each entry.
2. Mark every abbreviation you cannot source from a public document as provisional until the published text is available.
3. Use the two visible entries, QME and ICT, exactly as the draft defines them.
4. Give the list an owner and a review date, because the published edition will settle it.
5. Add the clause 4 list to the reading task for the day the standard is published.

Where teams usually fall short

• QME written as quality metric element, which is a different phrase and sends a reader to the wrong concept.
• An abbreviation list copied from an older edition and never checked against the new one.

What happens next

Clause 5 is the first substantive clause about how the measures are used. Its three subclauses are the bridge between the vocabulary and the measure set in clause 6.