Semantics!

I’ve been spending the last week re-organization all the requirements that we’ve capture while building the new product.  Essentially, I started by just capturing the service documentation and the tagging the UI, BDD Scerarios, and Task estiamtes onto the end.  What started to happen was that as new work units came along that covered the save service workflow, documentation and requirements were starting to get duplicated and separated.  So my first realization was that Service Requirements and UI requirements were static things that should always be what the system is (or will be soon).  As different cards (Minimum Usable Features) came through the system, they would modify the Service and UI Requirements.  

So, in our MediaWiki I gave the Service Requirements a Category of Workflow, the UI requirements a Category of Form, and the Feature Card a Category of Story.

Next comes linking them together.  I had previously installed the Semantic MediaWiki Extension and had been finding ever more interesting ways of using it.  In this case, I found by linking the Story pages to the System and UI pages, I’d be able to do some good queries to get lists of Stories that had altered requirements and what parts of the system were going to be altered by cards in the pipeline.  For this I used the concept of “defines”, so that I had [[defines::form::UserLogon]] or [[defines::workflow::AuthenticateUser]].

After I’d worked this out, my Lean mind started looking upward and I realize there was an opportunity to look to the Marketable Features as well as the Minumum Usable Feature Set that we were currently working.  By this point, things were moving quickly; it was just a case of creating the “Feature Set” and “Feature” Categories and linking with a [[marketable-feature::Application Logon]] tag and adding a [[story::User Logon]] link to the feature page.

So I had:

MUFS

↓

[[marketable-feature::Application Logon]]

↓

[[story::User Logon]] 

↓

[[defines::form::UserLogon]]  |   [[defines::workflow::AuthenticateUser]]

This was great!  Now I have a high level view of the entire project and what parts of the application are going to be affected.    I added in some visualization tools so now I can generate MindMaps and HyperGraphs for the semantic data. Management likes it because they can see what all these Feature Cards on the Kan Ban mean in relation to the Big Features being requested and can get a firmer idea of how much is left to be done.

All in all, good times.