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Dear Reader,"VISTA is a process, not a product," say VISTA hardhats, but what do they mean? Let's find out.
The process is called the VISTA lifecycle, and it only superficially resembles any other software lifecycle. To follow it, you have to change everything about your software support and development - how you fund it, how you design it, who's in charge, how training takes place, and more. If you're willing to make these profound changes you can accomplish amazing things with VISTA.
Although the VISTA community depends on this lifecycle, no one has documented much of it. Let's do it.
It's a complex subject. My best guess is that it'll take the rest of 2009 just to finish a first draft. Rather than wait while I write and publish a refined explanation, let's sort it out in the open, together, here, in this blog.
One caveat: everything in VISTA's lifecycle is connected. Anything that seems to make sense by itself is really part of a far more complex system, and the meanings of things deepen and change when you come to understand how they relate to everything else.
This is a deep subject that needs and deserves patience and persistence, that rewards them with the ability to change the world for the better.
Yours truly,
Rick
4 comments:
As an addendum to this post, you should put up your "Status Fluxus" paper.
http://www.healthcare-its.com
Okay, let's begin. What say we start at ISO 15504 - Software Process Improvement and Capability Enhancement (SPICE)?
Dear Rodney,
Good point: we will definitely spend time in this blog discussing fluxus quo. I recently found some earlier material on it I wrote, which I looked for after you first asked me for it, but it's only in outline and presentation form. I also have fragments of essays I started over the years, but no coherent text.
In this blog, posting more or less every day, I hope to mine all of that material to see if we can't put it together and add what's missing to create the first complete written description of the principle of fluxus quo and the rest of the model.
I'm also counting on the reactions of the community - their questions, comments, and insights - to help me find the poor explanations, half-baked ideas, and missing concepts and principles in the blog to improve our explanation and understanding of our model.
Yours truly,
Rick
Dear Rodney,
My general plan of attack on this daunting subject is to start by getting all the past VISTA-specific discussion of software lifecycle (I've written a lot, but I've also found a few things on the subject written by others) out into the blog for us to dig through and fix, and then turn to the existing software lifecycle standards.
I am not familiar with ISO 15504, but I'll add it to Arden's list for us to go through together.
However, I don't want to start with these standards. I want to start by working through the core principles we have discovered together through VISTA's history.
Then, armed with that groundwork in strong principles, we can turn to these standards and evaluate them with clear eyes, to recognize and praise the good in them and also recognize and critique their flaws.
Finally, we can then either adopt the strongest of those standards for use in our community or we can craft our own combining the best of those standards with the best of what VISTA has taught us all.
I'm also hoping to work through the material one nibble at a time to help keep the discussions approachable for managers, government officials, reporters, and the general public - in short for all those who lack our experience with VISTA and therefore have not seen the principles in action the way we have. From that perspective, the standards require more understanding of the subject for such an audience to evaluate, so I have to lead the discussion to them rather than start with them.
Yours truly,
Rick
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