Tom Hoffman
2008-03-28 03:58:45 UTC
I realized I only sent this to the development list earlier in the
week, but it should also go to the general SchoolTool list...
What was most remarkable about the SchoolTool sprint at PyCon was how
routine it was, especially considering we had a team of three adults
and four high school students. The students, Andrew, Chris, Filip,
and Willi are all veterans of sprints on the CanDo project and got
right down to work the first morning of the sprint. Filip gets bonus
points for taking a cab to a nearby Radio Shack to buy a soldering
iron to fix his power cord prior to the beginning of the sprint. Also,
Ignas's buildout configuration made it much easier for everyone to hit
the ground running with a working set of packages.
The main goal for the sprint was to finally break out of SchoolTool's
traditional navigation paradigm based around traversing the ZODB's
object hierarchy and establish a more task based system. For example,
if a teacher wants to do their grades, they should be able to just
click on a prominent "grades" tab or link and get to work.
The hard-won lesson from previous sprints is that the navigational
changes need to be done in a backward compatible way. If every single
view in the system has to be touched and/or redesigned to complete the
transition, it is impossible to complete the job at the sprint, and
difficult to maintain the momentum to complete the job in the face of
other pressing local needs. So while the new navigation system is not
"done," it is functional, and will be used in our test schools and
upcoming releases. It can and will be prettier in the future, and
there are numerous refinements and finishes necessary, but I don't
anticipate another full scale reorganization for a long, long time.
A couple observations from after we made the initial changes. Jeff
Elkner looked at the main calendar page, which he's presumably seen
dozens of times over the past couple years (at least) and said "Hey,
you can print out PDF's and export to iCal." Of course, you've been
able to do those things all along, they're just more noticeable now.
So that looks like an improvement.
Also, Ignas observed that not having breadcrumbs and an navigation
menu hanging around will take away some crutches that let us get away
with not thinking about the user experience. It was too easy to let
the user find his or her way out of traps with the breadcrumbs, but
every time that happened, it was really a failure of usability.
Ignas also prepared a queue of nagging, mostly calendar-related, bugs
to keep everyone busy throughout the three day sprint. Ignas did an
excellent job of organizing and leading development at the sprint and
getting the best out of our interns.
Screenshot: http://www.schooltool.org/Members/th1a/images/teacher-calendar/view
Done list:
Removed breadcrumbs (Ignas).
Moved navigation menu to top (Ignas).
Made actions menu row of buttons (Ignas).
Yearly calendar view displays term information (Filip).
Made SchoolTool more beautiful in many small ways (Andrew).
Creation of a manage tab, centralizing management screens (Ignas).
Fixes to timetabling management UI (William).
Fixed score system bug in add activities view (Paul).
Added a home view for persons (William).
Removed use of deprecated zapi (Alan).
Refactored calendar portlet to be viewlet based (Filip).
Significantly improved weekly calendar view with timetable integration (Chris).
Improved SchoolTool resource booking view (Andrew).
--Tom
week, but it should also go to the general SchoolTool list...
What was most remarkable about the SchoolTool sprint at PyCon was how
routine it was, especially considering we had a team of three adults
and four high school students. The students, Andrew, Chris, Filip,
and Willi are all veterans of sprints on the CanDo project and got
right down to work the first morning of the sprint. Filip gets bonus
points for taking a cab to a nearby Radio Shack to buy a soldering
iron to fix his power cord prior to the beginning of the sprint. Also,
Ignas's buildout configuration made it much easier for everyone to hit
the ground running with a working set of packages.
The main goal for the sprint was to finally break out of SchoolTool's
traditional navigation paradigm based around traversing the ZODB's
object hierarchy and establish a more task based system. For example,
if a teacher wants to do their grades, they should be able to just
click on a prominent "grades" tab or link and get to work.
The hard-won lesson from previous sprints is that the navigational
changes need to be done in a backward compatible way. If every single
view in the system has to be touched and/or redesigned to complete the
transition, it is impossible to complete the job at the sprint, and
difficult to maintain the momentum to complete the job in the face of
other pressing local needs. So while the new navigation system is not
"done," it is functional, and will be used in our test schools and
upcoming releases. It can and will be prettier in the future, and
there are numerous refinements and finishes necessary, but I don't
anticipate another full scale reorganization for a long, long time.
A couple observations from after we made the initial changes. Jeff
Elkner looked at the main calendar page, which he's presumably seen
dozens of times over the past couple years (at least) and said "Hey,
you can print out PDF's and export to iCal." Of course, you've been
able to do those things all along, they're just more noticeable now.
So that looks like an improvement.
Also, Ignas observed that not having breadcrumbs and an navigation
menu hanging around will take away some crutches that let us get away
with not thinking about the user experience. It was too easy to let
the user find his or her way out of traps with the breadcrumbs, but
every time that happened, it was really a failure of usability.
Ignas also prepared a queue of nagging, mostly calendar-related, bugs
to keep everyone busy throughout the three day sprint. Ignas did an
excellent job of organizing and leading development at the sprint and
getting the best out of our interns.
Screenshot: http://www.schooltool.org/Members/th1a/images/teacher-calendar/view
Done list:
Removed breadcrumbs (Ignas).
Moved navigation menu to top (Ignas).
Made actions menu row of buttons (Ignas).
Yearly calendar view displays term information (Filip).
Made SchoolTool more beautiful in many small ways (Andrew).
Creation of a manage tab, centralizing management screens (Ignas).
Fixes to timetabling management UI (William).
Fixed score system bug in add activities view (Paul).
Added a home view for persons (William).
Removed use of deprecated zapi (Alan).
Refactored calendar portlet to be viewlet based (Filip).
Significantly improved weekly calendar view with timetable integration (Chris).
Improved SchoolTool resource booking view (Andrew).
--Tom