ABPSC — Revise Guidance Note on Beta nomenclature

The P&P in Clause: 4.4.1.6 para 2 states:
“Any interim versions of the Specification published by the F/RTF during its life, and the revised Specification delivered with the report, shall be labelled as Beta Specifications, with a sequence number if required.”

This describes the need for Beta specifications to have sequence numbers if required but is non specific about the numbering. In practice we have adopted a tradition of having Beta1 as the baseline for FTF, Beta2 as the outcome of FTF and if needed the baseline for FTF2, and Beta3 as outcome of FTF2.

In order to provide clarity on how to characterize intermediate Beta versions, for example for the “before” and “after” versions of a generated specification for change markup, we recently introduce guidance to xTFs to use the intermediate designations Beta1.1, Beta 1.2 or Beta 2.1, Beta 2.2 etc. as appropriate.

There is no need to change the formal requirement in 4.4.1.6 but there is a Guidance Note at Clause 4.4.2 which is more specific and assumes that interim Beta will be numbered with whole numbers, which we do not do, and so is misleading. This Guidance Note can be updated to refer to the Beta 1.n, Beta 2.n etc. recommendation. It may also be expanded to describe the now-universal practice of having the specific roles for Beta 1, Beta2 and Beta 3 described above, which members may already assume is a requirement.

This change would make no change to the normative content of the P&P but bring the bracketed guidance notes into line with what we actually do and are proposing to do going forward.