Another problem is that process engineering departments don't have enough resources to produce
all of the method content needed in the field. For example, they usually can't provide content for
different versions of the same tool. Hence, the method content remains unchanged, and the
organization loses the collective knowledge and understanding of its practitioners who can revise
the content based on real-world field knowledge.
Note: Some of the content is often priority to an organization; an example is the Insurance
Application Architecture (IAA) model, which is proprietary to a company like IBM.
Other techniques have been used to solve the same problem. Consider the following: An administrator
or process engineer can republish the static method on a regular basis (for example, monthly,
weekly, daily). However, a process needs to be established to incorporate practitioner feedback or
contributions into the method. Also, the problem is aggravated by the fact that the method is
published along with a tool, such as IBM Rational Software Architect and doesn't get updated until
Rational Software Architect gets updated. Practitioners build their own pages with up-to-date
information, but these pages are scattered and not integrated with method and process contents.
Create extensible method content with Web 2.0
Ideally, you want to be able to extend software development processes and methods with extensions
built collaboratively, and dynamically populated at the time practitioners use the method. Figure 1
shows you what this looks like.
Figure 1: Collaborative and dynamic method overview
There are several activities associated with this collaborative and dynamic content. Let's take a
closer look at these activities.
Extension point identification
The process engineer identifies extension points in a static method. Typically these extension
points are in areas of the method that describe new or improved techniques, or both, and in areas
for which content needs to be built with the help of community or will quickly become out of date. |
