Development Process

We are taking an iterative / agile approach to developing SCOOP. The iterations will be question centric.

Question Centric Development

Question Centric development ensures that we focus on answering an increasing set of clinical study questions as we develop. Obviously there will be other aspects, but one of the primary metrics for development will be what questions are we able to answer in our design and in our implementations. We have a set of prototypical questions that we are using to guide our development.

Early questions will be simple and have limited data requirements. Later questions will build off earlier work.

• Iteration 0 will focus on basic demographics questions: what is the population breakdown of the network and how close is it to national averages.
• Iteration 1 will look at issues of polypharmacy in the elderly
• Iteration 2 will add in medication classes to look at the frequency of prescribed classes of drugs
• Iteration 3 is focused on increasing the export layer and understanding the alignment between our test EMR and the data export specification.

Questions won't be the only pieces that get worked on, of course, but the idea is that each delivery milestone, at least for the first several iterations, will add questioning capability to the system along with each release. There will be internal sprints that work on other aspects that get deployed as well (security hardening, more robust question management, etc.).

Tick Tock* Development

We are adjusting our approach somewhat from solely question centric development to an alternating approach where one cycle we develop functionality related to a question and the second cycle will focus on quality.

Tick - new question. required new features, new data, new visualizations.

Tock - quality. Paying down debt, refactoring, security enhancements, etc.

• • the name is borrowed from intel.

Collaborate with Existing Products

We want to work with existing open source projects where possible, adapting and extending to make them primary care relevant.