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- Two-year overlap is very helpful for SIS vendors; slower release of breaking changes is more favorable in general.
- SEA's are challenged with downstream effects of breaking changes, in addition to the impact on clients.
- May have many code changes to apply internally to accept the change.
- Almost impossible to make upgrades in back-to-back years.
- Thus would like to avoid having consecutive year breaking changes, as implied by the current "break-break-rest" strategy.
- Sense of themeetingthe meeting: the "break-rest-rest rest revised" model, which includes the two years of overlap between prior and current breaking change, seems to be the best fit for all.
- Reminder: technology has now been separated from Data Standard, making it possible to upgrade a data standard without taking breaking technology changes.
- The slide deck originally showed versions like "4.0", "5.0", and "6.0", leading to a question about minor versions.
- The deck now has "4.x", "5.x", "6.x", etc., to indicate that this is talking about the major version number, which is only incremented when there are breaking changes.
- During the supported lifetime of 5.x, for example, there may be multiple minor releases: 5.1, 5.2, etc.
- Each of those minor releases is fully backward compatible with the minor release before, i.e. 5.2 would be backward compatible with 5.0 and 5.1.
- How does this impact certification?
- Did not previously track minor releases, but going forward, vendors will be able to declare which specific version they're targeting for certification.
- An organization that certifies on 5.0 in 2024 could update to 5.1 in 2025 if desired, by simply showing that they now also support new features provided in Data Standard 5.1.
- New features in Data Standard 5.1 are likely to be domain-specific, meaning that the SIS Vendor or Assessment Vendor certifications would likely not have new requirements.
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