write roadmap for the project

[afeld]

As a [potential] user of the project, I want to know about the current status, as well as what's planned for the project at a high level. We can also include information about how we prioritize.

[nikzei]

A few considerations that surfaced in our 8/22 check in that can help us in setting priorities while building out the fedramp templater:

• what are the most difficult sections for the preparer to fill out? (finicky control statements are one of them says @brittag . . .)
• where is there the most churn?
• where is there repetition?

--> The story of how we approach building the templater then becomes: "We’re prioritizing the pieces that we believe might reduce labor for our users the most."

A few points from @brittag:

extra context: none of it is really hard to fill out the first time; it’s just clicking and typing. The hard part is that the control statements need to change frequently and also include structured information, and you need to generate reports from that structured information as it changes (such as ‘how many are planned / how many are implemented’) so I would prioritize generating the control statements from actually structured machine-processable information, to reflect the inherent structure in the doc, so that we can handle those parts more easily

and . . .

It would be practical for a person to manually maintain the first 36 pages (the system overviews, contact info, diagrams, etc) and the last page (the list of attachments) - you could generate the 377 pages of control statements in the middle and then copy-and-paste the first and last chunks

[nikzei]

I'm wondering a few things:

• Having a roadmap seems very useful as a reference while we're making decisions and building this out. But how important do you all think it is for us to have a written road map of our process here in the longrun? Like, will having a formal roadmap of this process be so important after the templater is usable? Or is it more something to help us along through our process.
• It would probably be best to house this issue someplace where we will continually revisit it while we pass through sprints and make decisions about how to move forward. Is this good where it's at or should we move it?

[afeld]

how important do you all think it is for us to have a written road map of our process here in the longrun?

I think you had asked about how we should prioritize, so I'd direct that question back to you 😉 Having it written somewhere (e.g. in this issue) is enough for me.