Principle Driven Development of Standards

One of the things we did for the C-CDA DSTU 2.1 project was identify a number of principles we would use to make decisions about how to modify templates written in C-CDA DSTU 2.0 to support backwards compatibility with C-CDA DSTU 1.1.  So long as we agreed upon the principles (and we've tested them out), we can simply do the work using these principles to guide us.  Those principles have become invaluable as a means of determining what needs to get done.

Principles come in a variety of forms.  They can be:

1. part of your methodology or process.
2. derived from the scope of your project.
3. based upon best practices.

Using principles to guide the development makes it easier to make decisions.  All too often in development, we wind up answering the same kinds of questions repeatedly (and in the same way). If you find yourself doing that, you've probably found a place where you should be defining a principle.

   Keith