Tooling Strategy and Process Revision

Project Insight # 801 Project Description: Revise existing Tooling Work Group Processes to include coordination with other Work Groups and to specify criteria for tooling project selection and prioritization. Initially titled 'Process alignment for ES and Tooling', with description "Tooling will work with Electronic Services to align the requirements gathering and tool selection processes to ensure resources are available to develop or enhance requests for tools that come to either group that may impact the other group."

Project Need: The HL7 Board has emphasized that the Tooling Work Group needs to focus on tools that make implementing HL7 standards easier as well as those needed to develop and publish HL7 standards. Since tools now often have a web presentation, the Electronic Services Work Group needs to be consulted, as well as Publishing to ensure tools remain coherent and to coordinate resources and schedules.

Working on elements of the Tooling Strategy:

• defining coordination with other Work Groups
  • establishing Tooling Liaisons to other Work Groups,
  • regular reporting from Liaisons
  • setting expectations for active participation in Tooling work group
    • Formalize processes that increase non-tool developers’ active participation in tooling projects (e.g. acceptance testing)

• specification of criteria for tooling project selection and prioritization
  • Recognizing that strategic efforts like SAIF, FHIR & Tooling become components of an overarching technical strategy
    • That strategy is aligned with the organizational objectives as identified in the strategic initiatives
  • HL7’s strategic intent to use the Eclipse Platform, including the expectations of intra-tool data exchange (from 2012-04-12_Tooling_Call)
  • FHIR initiative and tooling: the production of the standard is based on a tool chain. The tool chain is open source and hosted on GForge SVN. What is Tooling's responsibility on that tool chain maintenance and provision? The ability to produce the standard from the tool chain is the concern. By the next January WGM in Phoenix we may want to schedule a joint quarter to decide how to manage the tool chain going forward.
  • Resolved 2011Sept: we prioritize tools:
    • firstly, based on the critical path to ensure standards are produced on a regular basis according to schedule,
    • secondly, based on Board direction and
    • thirdly, subject to available funding to complete an existing tooling project so as not to dilute the ability to fully complete a project

• Part of new strategy is that funding will be a subsidy for additional participation for those that are already working on areas of interest. This is in comparison to historical commissioning of the building of tools by commercial tool builders. (from 2012May Tooling WGM Minutes)
  • Proposal for trialing a new process for funded projects using the EHRS-FM and MAX projects.
    • a number of Tooling projects, some of which are volunteer driven need to move from a strategy of commissioning people to perform projects to a strategy of participation in other tooling efforts to build tools that work for us as well. The clear path is probably to fund this effort (from 2012-05-12 TSC Meeting minutes)
    • some guidance needed on what the budget document design should be for targeting likely budget amounts, such as: here are the people, these resources, and this is what we could accomplish for this chunk of money, and can scale back according to funding available. (from 2012-04-19_Tooling_Call)

• Proposed Process
  • PSS mandatory, w co-sponsorship from requesting Work Groups
  • Requesting Work Groups to provide resources to document requirements, review deliverables and test software; may request funding subsidy
  • Requirements documented w sufficient detail to produce time/cost estimates
  • Request for proposal based on requirements to solicit resources to be developed by requesting Work Groups and reviewed by Tooling
  • Request to be sent to Contracts listserve to solicit resources
  • May request funding subsidy for identified roles in the project that cannot be completed with only volunteers
  • Criteria for selecting resources gives preference to individuals already volunteering
  • Proposals need to indicate estimated time contributing as volunteer and estimated funded time
  • Contracts to be approved deliverables based
  • Tooling to lead proposal evaluation, any Tooling WG members will recuse themselves for any proposals they are involved in
  • Successful proposals to enter into contract w HQ
  • Tooling and requesting Work Groups to review and approve deliverables
  • More detailed processes being worked out with HQ and CTO

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Formerly/copied from HL7_-_Tooling_&_Electronic_Services_alignment

• Objectives
  • Work to crate a common understanding of information architecture
  • Work to create a common understanding of infrastructure & technical architecture
  • Work to create a common application architecture
  • Work to reduce the tools used to meet members needs to a common uniform set
  • Develop best practices for using tools
• Issues
  • Multiple places to store "stuff"
  • Tooling map for members to be able to do what they need to do
  • Members don't know who to go to to get needs met
  • Protect HL7 intellectual property and assets
  • Disaster recovery - backup & restore - future proof
  • Multiple tools used to do the same thing
  • Insight/GForge/Wiki/Webpage used to "store artifacts"
• Solutions
  • Understand which group is responsible for what sorts of information
  • List of tools and what tools can be used and what they are most useful for
  • Understand what purposes for which we use tools
  • Understand what process to use to get tooling requirements met
  • ESWG is responsible for "collaboration tooling", eg. conference calls, wiki's, website, list-serves, balloting desktop
  • Project Services is responsible for project management, i.e. project insight
  • Tooling is responsible for "artifact design tooling", project support, eg Gforge and source control, and "publication tooling" (in concert with v3 Publishing WG), eg PubDb, publication desktop
  • PIC is responsible for recommending best practices for "Work Group process artifact tooling"
  • coordinate requests at the Steering Division level
  • see Platform Function Lists on T3SD Wiki site