Document Formats For Software Release Manifests?

Lt. Wuff asks: "I work in the QA/testing realm. My second biggest headache (QA being treated like the unwanted bastard child of software development being the biggest) is poor documentation of a given deliverable. If I don't know what's coming, I really can't plan the testing. Along the same lines, there really needs to be a way to get a quick glance at a release and know where it's at and what it's doing. Release notes tend to chase the development and are only somewhat useful for test planning. I'm not sure home many people here use something like a release contents document in their development/testing cycle, but I'm a huge fan of using them to control scope, manage expectations and allow me to plan testing. It's a quick glance at the release that anyone can understand. I've got a pretty bland format that assumes that the people are using some issue tracking software and I'm looking for others (i.e. developers) who use something like this to share ideas with."