Tom Hoffman
2008-05-20 15:38:55 UTC
Here's Alan Elkner's report from his sprint last week with Eldar
Omuraliev. The big news on the SchoolTool side is that they were able
to quickly integrate CanDo's competency tracking into SchoolTool's new
navigation paradigm, so we're continuing to make progress "de-forking"
CanDo and making its functionality accessible to SchoolTool users.
Alan's report:
This last week saw great advances for the CanDo package of SchoolTool.
It started with a meeting in Richmond, Virginia, with the state
administration regarding the up-coming deployment of CanDo in eight
new pilot sites across the state. All parties agreed that we were to
go ahead with the deployment this Fall. It was decided that support
would be handled by the state office with coordination back with the
Arlington Career Center when needed. The priority for reliability and
ease of use will greatly drive the upcoming summer development effort.
Lastly, we had the opportunity to discuss some of the technical
issues regarding competencies which, following the meeting, led us to
make some very important design decisions.
After the meeting with the state, we gathered back at the Arlington
Career Center to plan the development sprint that Alan Elkner and
Eldar Omuraliev undertook this last week. Together with David Welsh
and Jason Straw, Alan and Eldar discussed a new design for course and
section competencies. The first issue addressed was removing the need
for competency inheritance, a source of customer confusion and
occasional data-integrity problems. The second issue was how best to
address year to year changes in the global competencies that the state
publishes and the complexity of reimporting those changes into an
existing CanDo deployment.
The good news was that one solution will be able to address both
issues. Since the state will always supply us with global ids for the
competencies they publish, we can reliably use them as keys for the
course and section competencies. Secondly, the fact that these global
ids will never change regardless of how they may be organized into the
competency groups, we will not need to worry if the structure of those
competency groups changes from year to year. By keeping a list of
global competency ids attached to courses and sections, and not
keeping any references to groups, we have the ability to deliver those
competencies to the grade book with complete reliability. Bottom
line, no need for inheritance and no difficulties reimporting.
The rest of the week involved the actual coding sprint. The first
task was to integrate CanDo into the new SchoolTool tabbed interface
and, in the process, remove the need for specifying the CanDo skin in
the url or CanDo requests. The integration took only a couple of
days, and now CanDo looks even cleaner than before. The seem-less
integration with SchoolTool will allow users to switch between CanDo
and the rest of SchoolTool merely by clicking on the tabs at the top.
With the remaining two days of the sprint we got started with the
overhaul of the course and section competencies. The use of global
ids is now unit-tested, and the presence of inheritance has been
completely removed form the user interface. Eldar's job for the next
month will be to create views for assigning global ids to courses and
sections and for creating the leaner and cleaner grade book that uses
them. The new grade book will not only take advantage of the more
reliable competency design, but it will also reduce the time to load
by only loading those competencies of the most recently graded
competency group.
In all, it was an exciting and highly productive week, and Eldar has a
clear understanding of what he needs to do for the next month. When
we gather for the next development sprint in June, we will be bringing
last year's interns aboard as junior developers, and we will be able
to focus intensely on writing comprehensive functional tests for the
entire CanDo application. This will allow us to address the high
priority issue of application reliability favored by the folks at the
State of Virginia as well as allow us to move forward with any new
features with complete confidence. In short, we will be ready for the
Fall deployment.
Omuraliev. The big news on the SchoolTool side is that they were able
to quickly integrate CanDo's competency tracking into SchoolTool's new
navigation paradigm, so we're continuing to make progress "de-forking"
CanDo and making its functionality accessible to SchoolTool users.
Alan's report:
This last week saw great advances for the CanDo package of SchoolTool.
It started with a meeting in Richmond, Virginia, with the state
administration regarding the up-coming deployment of CanDo in eight
new pilot sites across the state. All parties agreed that we were to
go ahead with the deployment this Fall. It was decided that support
would be handled by the state office with coordination back with the
Arlington Career Center when needed. The priority for reliability and
ease of use will greatly drive the upcoming summer development effort.
Lastly, we had the opportunity to discuss some of the technical
issues regarding competencies which, following the meeting, led us to
make some very important design decisions.
After the meeting with the state, we gathered back at the Arlington
Career Center to plan the development sprint that Alan Elkner and
Eldar Omuraliev undertook this last week. Together with David Welsh
and Jason Straw, Alan and Eldar discussed a new design for course and
section competencies. The first issue addressed was removing the need
for competency inheritance, a source of customer confusion and
occasional data-integrity problems. The second issue was how best to
address year to year changes in the global competencies that the state
publishes and the complexity of reimporting those changes into an
existing CanDo deployment.
The good news was that one solution will be able to address both
issues. Since the state will always supply us with global ids for the
competencies they publish, we can reliably use them as keys for the
course and section competencies. Secondly, the fact that these global
ids will never change regardless of how they may be organized into the
competency groups, we will not need to worry if the structure of those
competency groups changes from year to year. By keeping a list of
global competency ids attached to courses and sections, and not
keeping any references to groups, we have the ability to deliver those
competencies to the grade book with complete reliability. Bottom
line, no need for inheritance and no difficulties reimporting.
The rest of the week involved the actual coding sprint. The first
task was to integrate CanDo into the new SchoolTool tabbed interface
and, in the process, remove the need for specifying the CanDo skin in
the url or CanDo requests. The integration took only a couple of
days, and now CanDo looks even cleaner than before. The seem-less
integration with SchoolTool will allow users to switch between CanDo
and the rest of SchoolTool merely by clicking on the tabs at the top.
With the remaining two days of the sprint we got started with the
overhaul of the course and section competencies. The use of global
ids is now unit-tested, and the presence of inheritance has been
completely removed form the user interface. Eldar's job for the next
month will be to create views for assigning global ids to courses and
sections and for creating the leaner and cleaner grade book that uses
them. The new grade book will not only take advantage of the more
reliable competency design, but it will also reduce the time to load
by only loading those competencies of the most recently graded
competency group.
In all, it was an exciting and highly productive week, and Eldar has a
clear understanding of what he needs to do for the next month. When
we gather for the next development sprint in June, we will be bringing
last year's interns aboard as junior developers, and we will be able
to focus intensely on writing comprehensive functional tests for the
entire CanDo application. This will allow us to address the high
priority issue of application reliability favored by the folks at the
State of Virginia as well as allow us to move forward with any new
features with complete confidence. In short, we will be ready for the
Fall deployment.