6 Part 6: V-Modell Reference Activities

6.3 Activities

6.3.5 Evaluation

6.3.5.4 Evaluating Document

Purpose

When testing a document, the quality of its contents and the consistency in relation to other dependent documents shall be assured. Testing will be based on the evaluation plan, the evaluation criteria and the »QA Manual and must not be performed by the creator himself.

During testing the document shall be analyzed and evaluated. This may be done for example on the basis of the following criteria:

• Is the document intelligible, easily surveyed, well structured and complete?
• Are the products, from which the document to be tested originated, available?
• Are the requirements against which the document is to be tested all documented, clear and intelligible?
• Was there compliance with the guidelines, standards, templates and processes to be used?

If the document is a specification, it also may be validated, if required, when screening the contents. In this case the receiver/user of the allocated system element will check, whether his expectations have been taken into account in the specification. An example of this is the testing of the interface specification by the »System Integrator.

The results of the test steps shall be described in the evaluation report so that they can be traced and provided with a summary and evaluation. The results of the the test may be incorporated for example in review statistics - e. g. in the degree of coverage, the number of annotations per page, the ratio of conducted to planned reviews or the number of errors found as a function of error class.

In case of a successful test, the state of the document shall be changed from "submitted" to "completed". Otherwise the state of the document to be tested and of all documents with contents depending on this document shall be specified "in preparation". This does not depend on whether the documents had already been submitted or completed. After rejection of the evaluation object, it shall be revised and resubmitted. In each case the project management shall be informed about the evaluation result.