A Annex A: Considerations for the use of quality measures

What this heading covers

The annex is where a measure set becomes a programme. The measures in clause 6 are a basic set, and the scope says they are not exhaustive and carry no rating levels. Annex A is the place the draft would deal with the questions that follow: which measures to select, how to combine them, how to set targets, how to compare results across products and how to report without overclaiming. The 2016 edition carried an annex with the same title, and its abstract describes the measures as intended primarily for quality assurance and improvement during or after the development lifecycle. The draft keeps the annex informative, so a team cannot be found nonconforming for departing from it, but a team that ignores it will produce numbers nobody can use.

Record position: annex 1 of 5. The heading is A in the public contents; its text is informative and not public.

What the heading asks of a team

What to put in place before publication

1. Write a selection note for each measure: the characteristic, the decision, the cost and the risk it addresses.
2. Set target values from the requirements and the product context, and label them as local decisions.
3. Agree a reporting template that carries the product, the conditions, the population and the measure version.
4. Review the selected set each year, and remove measures that no longer inform a decision.
5. Keep the annex reading on the list for the day the published text arrives, because the guidance may change.

Where teams usually fall short

• Every measure in the basic set collected because it is in the standard, with no decision behind any of them.
• A target value with no source, presented as if the standard set it.

What happens next

Annex B names the thirty-one quality measure elements the measures are built from. Read it next if you are building a measure catalogue.