DRAFT - Description of the UC Davis Software Standards Work Group - DRAFT

The UC Davis Software Standards Work Group (SSWG) is sponsored by UC Davis's IT Roadmap Coordinating Council to recommend standards and guidelines for the development, maintenance, operation, and overall management of software systems at UC Davis in order to facilitate:

• Interoperability of software systems within UCD's IT environment, as well as with systems outside of UCD.  The SSWG will recommend techincal standards for protocols, formats, and APIs to enable software systems at UCD to exchange data and processing.
• Sharing and reuse of software among UCD's organizational units.  Where appropriate, the SSWG will establish standards for platforms, programming languages, software management, programming style, etc. for software that is shared or reused among organizational units at UCD.  It will also recommend middleware and other UCD-wide infrastructure.
• Informed resource allocation and cost sharing models for UCD's software systems.  The SSWG will establish a common vocabulary and framework for the costs associated with the development, maintenance, and operation of software systems at UCD.  It will also recommend cost-sharing mechanisms that facilitate collaboration with appropriate leveraging of both central and departmental IT resources.

The SSWG also:

• Advises the IT Architect for his reviews of 200-45 submissions.
• Advises the IT Roadmap Coordinating Council on matters related to IT standards, as deemed appropriate by the Council.
• Advises UCD managers of opportunities where changes to business practice could result in greater effectiveness or reduced costs for its software systems.

SSWG-recommended standards and guidelines documents receive UCD-wide review via the PPM 200-45 process.  The IT Architect within the Office of the Vice Provost for Information and Educational Technology serves as the steward of this process, as well as the librarian for approved documents. The degree of compliance required for standards is based on the degree to which an application is shared, as well as criticality and sensitivity of the services the application provides.

Initial Work Plan

The SSWG should undertake the following tasks for completion by the end of calendar year 2009.

• Identify administrative and budgetary barriers to reuse and sharing of software within UC Davis, and recommend strategies to address them.
• Recommend a standard set of platforms and implementation languages for systems that may be operated by multiple organizational units over the systems' lifetimes.
• Develop a set of general principles to guide the group's recommendations.
• Recommend a work plan for calendar year 2010.

Overarching Issues

The SSWG will strive to achieve balance among the following issues in its deliberations.

• UC Davis's academic and business needs
• Interoperability to support interactions among academic and business activities, as well as to facilitate sharing of IT resources
• Robustness, availability, responsiveness, and scalability, as appropriate to specific services
• Security appropriate to the services and the data they manages
• Agility, modularity, and extensibility to meet evolving academic and business needs
• Documentation and maintainability of services
• Leveraging the use of UC Davis resources, overall, without sacrificing appropriate unit-level optimization and innovation
• Agility and flexibility of the standards process itself

Membership

Membership of the SSWG is drawn from the DTC, TIF, and other groups as appropriate.

Meetings

SSWG meetings are convened by the IT Architect on a monthly basis. Meeting notes are published online for review by the DTC, TIF, and other interested parties at UCD.