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. _______________________________________________ Schooltool mailing list [email protected] http://lists.schooltool.org/mailman/listinfo/schooltool
