Toronto Sprint, May 2014

Toronto Sprint

The fourth DDI Moving Forward Sprint was held in Toronto 26 - 30 May, immediately prior to the IASSIST conference. The attendees of the Sprint were Thérèse Lalor,  Franck Cotton, Giullaume Duffes, Johan Finn, Dan Gillman, Jay Greenfield, Arofan Gregory, Marcel Hebing, Elizabeth Hostetter, Jannik Jensen, Nicole Kirgis, Steve McEachern, Brigitte Mathiak, Olof Olsson, Barry Radler, Flavio Rizzolo, Wendy Thomas, Joachim Wackerow and Simon Wall.

Content Modelling work 

The following content areas were finalised by the Sprint Team. For each area, the output is in Drupal and is being reviewed by the modelling team.

Data Types

• Core - The Primitives and Extended Primitives have all been entered into Drupal. Content modelling team will see the output of this work in the populated "data type" lists that are used when entering properties into Drupal. All content modelling work had a dependency of this being completed, so it is great to see the result there and ready to be used b content modellers!

Library Objects

• Conceptual - These library objects cover all of the basic components of ISO/IEC 11179 as represented in GSIM Concepts group 

• Process - The work on Process added library objects which can be used to describe a generic process. 

• Agent - This group of library objects describe agents (organizations, individuals, agents, relationships) who relate to the metadata / data

Views

• Discovery - The Discovery view is the first view to be created! There is a new tab in Drupal called Views. This will be where the views can be, well, viewed  

Technical work

During the sprint, a large number of the questions and uncertainties surrounding the production framework were resolved. The group progressing the technical work spent much time investigating options for the production environment and improving the current tools. The result of this hard work was the first production test run. The group stepped through each step of the production environment and created the inputs and outputs for each step. You can read about the production test run and its results on the Production Framework Test wiki page. 

In the week following the Sprint, the first meeting of the Tools Support team met. This group will be the ones who help us to continue creating a functioning production environment. The team includes people with experience in working with each of the elements of the production environment (for example Drupal, Enterprise Architect, DocBook). 

Project Management work

In the background we have been doing some project management work to set up some structures and processes to help manage the DDI Moving Forward project in an agile way (see the Explain DDI 4 to me wiki page for more information on this). A Release Plan has been proposed based on the Content Backlog. 

At the Sprint, the mechanisms for managing the Content Backlog were set up. Now the user community can easily propose new views to be included in DDI 4. A group did some work on the Content Backlog, looking at the views that have been proposed and scoping some of the high priority views. In particular, the Classification and Methodology views were discussed. 

At the inaugural meeting of the Scientific Board (which took place just after the sprint on June 2), it was decided that an Advisory Group would be set up. This group will be responsible for prioritising the Content Backlog and decide the order in which views will be worked on (and then released).

New or updated documents

In addition to the content modelling completed in Drupal, the Production Test Run and the various project management documents created during the sprint, there were a number of documents that were updated of created by the group:

• Relating to other standards - In addition to the content modelling, some further discussion took place about how to relate to other standards in DDI 4. 
• Technical roadmap - For example, there had been a question about whether there would be a round trip from Drupal to Enterprise Architect. The questions regarding hte technical work discussed and conclusions reached can be read in the paper prepared by the group called Roadmap Production Process.
• Structure of DDI 4 - Due to the discussions and clarifications during the Sprint, the process for creating a view was simplified and the packages in the library was updated. These changes are reflected in the updated document

Summary of Outputs