Proposal for the removal of the Member Release review period
With the impending plans to move to a more Frequent Delivery schedule of the SNOMED CT International Edition (starting with a monthly cycle within the next year), we are now considering the requirements for review and feedback periods inherent in the current Release schedule.
Given the relative stability of recent releases, and the increased pressure that a Monthly release schedule would put upon the reviewers in the community, we are now considering removing the Beta and Member release periods which currently allow feedback to be provided before the final Production release is published. This change would be implemented from the transition to Frequent Delivery onwards.
If you can foresee any issues with this please let us know now, or contact SNOMED International ASAP at support@snomed.org with "International Edition Member release schedule question" in the subject line.
PRO's (for the removal of the Member Release review period) include, but are not limited to:
Including a Member Release review period in the new process simply forces a 6 monthly process into every month, thereby removing the benefits of agility that could otherwise result in an improved time to market for urgent content changes
We would have to enforce very STRICT criteria of what changes we would take action on as part of the Member feedback (that would actually convince everyone to either change the content in the upcoming Monthly release at such a late stage, OR to cancel the Release completely and postpone it for at least a month) - and therefore the likelihood of any issues actually being resolved as part of the same release cycle are very slim.
They would be restricted to:
Critical Patient Safety issues
Contractual issues (GMDN, LOINC, etc)
...both of which are already covered under our Critical Incident Policy, which allows us to:
take down the offending release from MLDS
mark it as INVALID for anyone who's already downloaded it in the ONLINE Release Notes
push comms to everyone who is on our MLDS list of who's downloaded the package
We don't expect any Members to have enough capacity to take the opportunity to review the content within such a tight timeframe (2-3 days) - especially every month!
This puts unnecessary pressure on authoring + mapping times, which will again reduce the ability to deliver important content to the users in good time.
CON's (for the removal of the Member Release review period) include, but are not limited to:
Retaining the Member Review period ensures that Members still feel part of the process
If Members find issues in the content of a release AFTER it's been published (say after 2 or 3 months), then the Member Review period was made available as an opportunity to have prevented the content from being published in the first place
It does at least provide the chance to get told about critical issues BEFORE we Publish them (even if it's inconvenient not to find out until 3 days before the release), rather than being told AFTER we Publish them!
So further discussion is required, in order to work out how the actual process might work in practice - for example:
a) the diagram in section 3.1.4 of the Proposal might not be feasible if we've already Versioned the content
b) we made every effort to ensure that it wouldn't reduce any of the content authoring time available, but we need to double check that any final solution doesn't reduce this ability, as otherwise it removes a significant benefit of Frequent Delivery!