Glossary of terms

Boilerplate text

Some may not be familiar with the term 'boilerplate'. Sections of the documentation are often applicable to each and every project or can be redacted or amended as needed. Such pre-written text is referred to throughout as boilerplate.

Change Freeze

A project enters a Change Freeze state when approaching the end of the development period and in good time so that remaining resources can be allocated to ensuring that all Must Have requirements are met. A final prioritisation of requirements is essential to make sure requirements are addressed in the most beneficial order. During Change Freeze no new functionality will be developed; resources must be preferentially allocated to bug fixing and finessing the highest priority requirements to ensure that a Minimum Viable Product is delivered at the very least. Projects might enter Change Freeze at different points depending on the nature of the development but a good rule of thumb would be to initiate Change Freeze when 10% of the development funding remains.

Delivery Plan

A delivery plan provides a high-level schedule of Increments for the project and the timeboxes that make up that Increment.

Increment

An Increment comprises a collection of one or more features which, as a group, have meaning/value for the project. One or more Increments may form a Release.

Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

The MVP represents the successful development of the Must Have requirements from the Feasibility and Product Quote documents. It can be considered that failure to deliver one or more of the Must Have requirements will compromise the rationale of the project.

Project Planning

A regular internal team meeting for the RSE team to discuss new project ideas and current project progress, in order to judge whether a new project is a good fit for the team. This will usually consider the skills available within the team, the research interests of the team, the strategic aims of the parent institution, and the allocation of available resources. Informally, the team's experiences with particular partners might influence borderline decisions.

Research Sponsor

This term is taken from the project roles identified in the Agile DSDM. It identifies the party with high level ownership of the project and should be a person, or group of people, empowered to advocate for the project. Someone who has been convinced of the value of the project and is in a position to give a green light to activity.

Research Visionary

This term is taken from the project roles identified in the Agile DSDM. It identifies the party who innovated the original and core concept of the project. In most RSE cases, this role is likely to be occupied by the PI(s)

Timebox

A fixed period of time, at the end of which an objective has been met. The objective would typically be a deliverable of some sort. Timeboxes can operate at development level, project and increment level. A timebox is managed by adding or removing content in order to meet the timebox objective and the deadline.

User journeys

A term used to describe the different modes of interaction that a variety of audiences will want to have with a digital resource. It is a helpful concept particularly for non-technical partners as it encourages partners to describe a typical user scenario in plain language using a layman's terminology. Examples might be: As an archivist, I wish to be able to identify items in the collection that mention [term A] and [term B], but exclude [term C] As a primary school teacher. I wish to ...