ESSENCE2 — Refine the discussion of kernal Alphas

Issues

The following text is verbose and long, uses the passive voice, and uses the past tense.

• https://issues.omg.org/browse/ESSENCE2-2 - Passive Voice
• https://issues.omg.org/browse/ESSENCE2-3 - Present Tense
• https://issues.omg.org/browse/ESSENCE2-4 - Personal Pronouns
• https://issues.omg.org/browse/ESSENCE2-5 - Streamline text

Original Text

The kernel Alphas 1) capture the key concepts involved in engineering, 2) allow the progress and health of any engineering endeavor to be tracked and assessed, and 3) provide the common ground for the definition of engineering methods and practices. The Alphas each have a small set of pre-defined states that are used when assessing progress and health. Associated with each state is a set of predefined checklists. These states are not just one-way linear progressions. Each time you reassess a state, if you do not meet all the checklist items, you can go back to a previous state. You can also iterate through the states multiple times depending on your choice of practices. The Alphas should not be viewed as a physical partitioning of your endeavor or as just abstract work products. Rather they represent critical indicators of the things that are most important to monitor and progress. As an example, team members, while they are part of the Team Alpha, are also stakeholders, and therefore can also be part of the Stakeholders Alpha. The Alphas, their relationships and their areas of concern are shown in Figure Error: Reference source not found.3. Note that the Alphas are agnostic to your chosen practices and method. For example, the relationship shown in Figure Error: Reference source not found.3 that the "team performs and plans work" does not imply any specific order in which they perform and plan the work.

Suggestion

The kernel Alphas capture the key concepts involved in engineering:

• Allow the progress and health of any engineering endeavor to be tracked and assessed.
• Provide the common ground for the definition of engineering methods and practices.

Each Alpha has a small set of pre-defined states used when assessing progress and health, with each state associated with a predefined set of checklists. These states are not merely one-way linear progressions; returning to a previous state is possible if all checklist items are not met upon reassessment. Additionally, iteration through the states is possible depending on chosen practices.

The Alphas should not be viewed as a physical partitioning of the endeavor or merely abstract work products; rather, they represent critical indicators of the most important things to monitor and progress. For example, team members, while part of the Team Alpha, are also stakeholders and can thus be part of the Stakeholders Alpha. Figure 8.3 illustrates the Alphas, their relationships, and their areas of concern.

Note that the Alphas are agnostic to chosen practices and methods. For instance, the relationship depicted in Figure 8.3, where the "team performs and plans work," does not imply any specific order in which work is performed and planned.

Close

Generic writing guidelines are not necessarily applicable to the writing of specification documents. Nor does the seeming violation of such guidelines necessarily mean that any specific text is unclear as already written. All text in the specification was reviewed and adopted as is with specific technical interpretation. Any changes to the text for purely stylistic reasons must therefore be done with extreme care, followed by a full review, to ensure that such changes do not alter the interpretation of the text as it was adopted. This would require a considerable level of effort for a possible minor gain in presentation, which itself is likely to be subjective. Therefore, the FTF has chosen not to make such changes to the text for purely stylistic reasons.