This repository is designed to help track the work the FIMS Implementation team is involved in, including the progress towards completing the requirements outlined for the Fisheries Integrated Modeling System (FIMS). The repository is a public 🛣️roadmap🛣️ and uses GitHub Project Boards to facilitate the communication of our progress and next steps.
Visit our GitHub Project Board to view the backlogged, in progress, in review, and completed requirements for building FIMS.
Each requirement put forth by the FIMS Implementation Team is a row in this spreadsheet (accessible only to NOAA employees). In short, each row has multiple columns of interest but, value proposition and expected outcome, are the main columns of interest. The the value proposition is the pitch (the "why"), the expected outcome is the result (the "what").
- Definition: A clear, concise statement to communicate the unique value, benefits, and differentiators of a product or service to a target audience.
- Focus: Why the customer should choose you over competitors.
- Components: Addresses customer pain points and highlights gains.
- Purpose: To persuade, differentiate, and build trust.
- Definition: The tangible results, benefits, and gains a customer anticipates receiving from a product or service.
- Focus: What the customer achieves (e.g., time saved, money earned).
- Components: Quantifiable metrics (e.g., increased revenue, reduced risk).
- Purpose: To define success and measure value-in-use.
In 2021, a Google Doc was created where team members were encouraged to document all of the requirements needed for their Science Center regarding assessment models. The requirements were grouped into the following six categories: (1) model structure, (2) data, (3) model optimization, (4) testing, (5) reporting, and (6) documentation. Eventually, the information in the doc was moved to a Google Sheet to track their status.
In addition to tracking their status, each requirement was scored according to a three-metric prioritization scheme. Lower scores for each metric are better to make combining the three metrics easier. The requirements with the lowest scores were put first on the list to implement.
- Impact: The importance of this requirement to accuracy, desired features, or documented best practice in an ideal world. High impact/importance gets a value of 1.
- Effort: The difficulty in implementing this requirement. Difficulty may be measured as difficulty in any phase of the stock assessment process, from initial software implementation, to data collection, to testing of this requirement, to interpretation of results. High effort gets a value of 2.
- Compatibility: The importance of this requirement to backwards compatibility and comparability to existing tactical stock assessment management approaches. This should be measured as how necessary this feature is to accurately compare to a previous model, not how difficult this new addition makes data preparation or inclusion as compared to a previous model (that should be measured as "Effort"). Importance for compatibility gets a value of 1.
In 2026, this repository was un-archived to facilitate communication of the requirements beyond the FIMS Implementation Team.
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