UCMBSDWG¶

We wish we had a better acronym, but we don't! Your suggestions welcome.¶

We've been hard at work in the Use Case and MB Standards Development Working Group (UCMBSDWG).
A team of 10-ish:

• Rolled out an Agile process to release standards
• Defined initial ways to collaborate on those standards
• Liaised with the Framework Working Group

We want to use the Agile Mindset and Scrum practices to speed-up the typically slow standards process. Why? Because waiting 10 years to revise a standard just won't work with today's needs. We need to deliver quick wins, incrementally improve, and effectively use our highly in-demand subject matter expert volunteers.

As such, we rolled out an agile process to two Working Groups: MBE Terms and Framework. The initial processes we've proposed reflects how we develop standards, how the Subcommittee approves content, and how we pass our work to ASME so they can start their release process. The goal is to refine and iterate on the process and enable continuous development and integration of new features of the standards.

The complexity of implementing an agile process for standards development comes from the fact that groups of volunteers have other commitments that often take precedence. This set of constraints means what might be a regular cadence of scheduled working sessions, often devolves into chaos, leaving the Subcommittee at the mercy of over 20 different companies schedules and priorities.

We propose to use the techniques of Scrum, part of the Agile Mindset. We are adopting a bi-weekly working session cadence and challenging ourselves to get the right sized tasks assigned to our highly-valued volunteers. We are working to defined Scrum Master and Product Owner roles that align with the leaders of each working group to facilitate the Scrum methods.

After that big process leap, we've defined working documents, structures, templates and examples that we hope will help guide indivudual MBE SC volunteers to perform their assigned tasks, and to make their contributions as efficient as possible. The next task is to create system engineering and modeling guidelines to figure out how to distribute activities to leverage domain experts who may not be conversant in system engineering modeling.

The UCMBSD group is also tracking the Framework group, and will develop models that enable the expression of the system architecture and breakdown as we develop models for enterprise integration. The goal of modeling and using an agile processes is to increase the release cadence to create value for enterprises that are struggling with systems that do not communicate and operate on disparate models and semantics.