AAF Engineering Committee
Engineering Procedures

Version: DRAFT 3a
Prepared by: Oliver Morgan (Avid)
Date: March 31, 2000
Remarks: Added "Immediate Activity" section

Purpose

The purpose of the AAF Engineering Committee is to plan and supervise engineering activities that foster industry adoption of AAF. These activities include:

• Maintenance and update of the AAF Specification
• Maintenance and update of the AAF Reference Implementation and SDK
• Maintenance and update of user documentation
• Creation of AAF demonstration and education material
• Creation and maintenance of AAF Validation Services
• Creation and maintenance of AAF Registry Services

Overall Schedule

It is the earnest desire of the AAF Association to have a finite lifetime with concrete goals. Therefore, none of the activities are planned to be "continuous" or "annual". The overall schedule is as follows:

• Sept 2000 – Completion of AAF V1.0
• Sept 2001 – Completion of AAF V1.5
• Sept 2002 – Completion of AAF V2.0
• Spring 2003 – Examine the need for a follow-on
• December 2003 – Sunset, or hand over to successor

Reasoning & Assumptions

• NAB 2000 will see SDK DR2. DR3 will follow in the summer, as the V1.0 release candidate.
• IBC 2000 will see the completion of the SDK as originally planned, with the involvement of all Founders.
• That process will have resulted in an understanding and agreement on a first urgent update to the spec and SDK, to be called V1.5
• Design and implementation of V1.5 will take until NAB 2001
• Completion and release will take until IBC 2001
• Less urgent and/or more extensive updates will be collected into a V2.0 specification.
• Design and implementation of V2.0 will take until NAB 2002
• Completion and release will take until IBC 2002
• V2.0 will be monitored and maintained until the end of the following year. This period will include planning for long term support.

Immediate Activity

The efforts of the AAF Association Engineering Committee from NAB 2000 until IBC 2000 will be focused on delivery of V1.0.

Milestones

Milestone dates are:

• Apr 2000 – NAB, DR2
• July/Aug 2000 – DR3 (RC), Acceptance Testing
• Sept 2000 – IBC, V1.0 SDK Release
• Nov 2000 – Developer Conference

These milestones are defined as:

DR2 (April, NAB 2000)

• Specification: frozen
• Specification documentation:
• tables and diagrams: 100%
• editorial: draft
• API: frozen
• API documentation: 100%
• On-disk format: frozen
• Class, Property, Type Ids
  (SMPTE labels vs. AAF labels): frozen
• User’s Guide, Introduction: draft
• Module tests: 75%
• Utilities/Examples/Regression Tests: 50%
• DR3 (Release Candidate) (July, Siggraph 2000)
• Unix: 100%
• XML: 100%
• Documentation: 90%
• Module Tests: 90%
• Utilities/Examples/Regression Tests: 75%
• Support plan: 50%
• Additional training courseware and collateral: 50%

V1.0 Release (Sept, IBC 2000)

• Documentation: 100%
• Module Tests: 100%
• Bug-free zero P1, less than approx 10 P2, stable ³ 2 weeks
• Utilities/Examples/Regression Tests: 100%
• Multi-vendor interop demo (need to define): ready for public display
• Open-source: published but locked, procedures unknown
• Support plan: 100%
• Additional training and collateral: 75%
• Developer Conference (Nov 2000)
• Additional training and collateral: 100%
• Open-source: Go! (see below)

Open Issues (to be resolved post NAB)

Ranked by urgency:

1. P1: Any additional codecs (MPEG, DV)
2. P2: Support plan
3. P3: Additional training courseware and collateral
4. P4: Open-source

Procedure

Membership

The AAF Association will have:

• Voting Members, consisting of Principal Members (~11)
  and Full Members (~40)
• Associate/Observer Members ~40

Submission of Technology

Any Voting Member may bring forward requirements or technology for incorporation into V1.5 or V2.0, provided that:

• It is sponsored by at least one Principal Member
• It is documented as a delta to the V1.0 (or V1.5) spec
• It is submitted in draft before a published deadline (Oct 2000, Sept 2001)

• Three Developer Conferences will be held, one in each of 2024/2/3
• These conferences will have three purposes:
• Training
• Specification Review
• Annual General Meeting (of the Association)
• Specification proposals will be evaluated and reconciled during the first two Developer Conferences.
• These conferences will be held in the US in Autumn 2000, and Europe in Autumn 2001.
• Prototypes of spec updates are encouraged for discussion and evaluation at the conferences.
• The conferences will conclude with a voice vote on categories of specification updates and the appointment of an Editor and an Evaluating Group of 5 members for each category.
• A third Developer Conference will be held in Autumn 2002 in Japan or elsewhere. The focus of this conference will be deployment and maintenance.

Open Source

In addition, the first Developer Conference will mark the inauguration of Open Source Development.

Preparation for this will start with V1.0 DR2 and will include:

• Moving the Source Repository to the AAF web host
• Establishment of check-in and build procedures
• Appointment of Managers for various aspects of the SDK

Adoption of Proposed Specification

Spec discussion and editing will proceed with email and telephone conferences for up to 60 days after the Developer Conferences.

Each category of proposed update to the specification will then be circulated for email vote to Full and Principal members, and will be adopted provided that:

• Any conflicts with other categories of update have been resolved
• It is approved by a simple majority of Voting Members
• At least three Voting members (including at least one Principal Member) agree to share the burden of implementation in the SDK

Approval

Implementation will then be planned and executed. This will include the preparation of:

• Reference Implementation
• Validation and Regression Tests
• Documentation
• User Documentation
• Intellectual Property Releases
• One or more Developer Releases (DRs) at appropriate milestones
• A Release Candidate (RC)

Implementation will culminate in the conduct of Acceptance Tests of the Release Candidate, in which the Evaluating Group will review, test and reconcile the Reference Implementation, Tests and Documentation.

Release

The update will be released once a super-majority of the Evaluating Group (4 of the 5) accepts the correctness of the implementation.

• Apr 2000 – NAB, DR2
• July/August 2000 – DR3 (RC), Acceptance Testing
• Sept 2000 – IBC, V1.0 SDK Release
• Oct 2000 – V1.5 Spec Submission Deadline
• Nov/Dec 2000 – Developer Conference (US)

• Jan 2001 – Adoption of V1.5 Spec
• Apr 2001 – NAB, V1.5 DR and Demonstration
• June 2001 – V1.5 RC, Acceptance Testing
• Sept 2001 – IBC, V1.5 SDK Release
• Sept 2001 – V2.0 Spec Submission Deadline
• Oct 2001 – Developer Conference (Europe)
• Nov 2001 – Adoption of V2.0 Spec

• Apr 2002 – NAB, V2.0 DR, Demonstration
• June 2002 – V2.0 RC, Acceptance Testing
• Sept 2002 – IBC, V2.0 Release and Interoperability Demos
• Nov 2002 – Developer Conference (Japan)

• Apr 2003 – Succession Planning