Working Groups Focus on User Stories

November Portfolio Update

Working Groups Focus on User Stories

By Ben Craker, Portfolio Manager

I’d like to open by saying that if you’re attending the Annual Conference this month, the tables are well set for making some strong progress during our in-person working sessions. I’m really looking forward to seeing everyone there and building on all the hard work that’s been done this year, and to setting the course for a successful year ahead. October was a busy month for volunteers and staff working to move the needle on Working Group goals and priorities. In particular, the focus was on capturing user stories for many of the current Working Groups.

Below is an overview of progress from last month:

The Field Boundaries: Use Cases and Definitions Working Group (WG17) has been meeting in small groups focused on each of the fifteen different use cases identified in the charter. Once the groups are done documenting the use cases, the larger group will review to identify the various requirements, terms and related information needed to efficiently communicate between parties regarding field boundaries. This work will be foundational to subsequent working groups that dig in to how to uniquely identify field boundaries and describe their accuracy, as well as other work streams identified by the Field Boundary Subcommittee.

The Scale Ticket Working Group (WG15) has also been busy documenting the different needs related to a scale ticket for various grain transactions as well as adding additional information related to fertilizer. The group plans to have all use cases documented by the end of the month and begin gap checking some existing digital scale ticket implementations against the requirements identified in the various use cases to develop a standardized OpenAPI specification.

Laboratory Data Standardization Working Groups (WG04 and WG11) have been working though the Modus lab testing data standard and are getting close to wrapping up their work. The team has begun pulling together some of the launch and announcement material in preparation for releasing their work. The main focus lately has been some final cleanup and checking of the new codes against the existing Modus methods to ensure backward compatibility. The plan is to release the new version and materials at the Annual Conference as well as show some implementations that have been done by the Purdue OATS Center in conjunction with OpenTEAM.

Both Crop Protection Product Guidelines (WG 16) and Crop Nutrition Third Party Product Management (WG18) are also making good progress. WG16 has started documenting some best practices for maintaining accurate crop protection product data in tools like AGIIS. This included some new ideas on how to use a GTIN hierarchy that can streamline data exchange between manufacturers, distributors, and retailers for crop protection products. WG18 has made consistent progress reviewing existing messages to gap check them for 3rd party management of crop nutrition products. The teams’ biweekly meetings are coming along well, and they should be wrapping up their work on schedule.

Looking forward, there has been a lot of activity related to ADAPT Serialization. As the standardization effort continues, a few interested parties have been discussing requirements to serialize data using the new standardized schema. This led the team to some very interesting discussions related to taking a more geospatial centric approach instead of the machine or device centric model in the current ADAPT Framework. If you are interested in joining the discussion, be sure to contact Member Services to get the invite for the ADAPT Standardization calls happening Wednesdays at 11:00am Eastern time.

As always if you have any questions on a specific working group or subcommittee feel free to contact the Portfolio Manager Ben Craker, or if you want to get involved complete the form to join a working group. Additionally, if you have a pain point, submit an idea for a new working group using this form.