So you thought the £100m of licence fee payers' money the BBC wasted on its Digital Media Initiative left nothing of lasting value, right? Think again. According to the glossary of terms contained in an Accenture report about the debacle (read it in its entirety here) it also gave us "Jira" (An issue and project tracking software used by the BBC as part of Agile methodologies), "Cashmere" (A project in Jira that is maintained by the business users and not by the DMI team), "Perspex", "Silk" and "Velvet" which were, obviously, also projects in Jira. Then there was something called the "Happy path", testing where "only the simple positive type of testing of functional testing is conducted. Negative or boundary conditions are not exercised as part of Happy Path testing" and "FitNesse", an "automated tool that allows non-technical users to specify and run acceptance tests for software systems". DMI, of course, turned out not to be FitNesse for purpose. The whole thing, had it ever taken off, would have been known as "Fabric". Now the BBC, having to spend £3m a year on a database system that previously cost less than £1m, has had to cut its cloth rather differently.
