Iteration 6 was completed as planned with Blackboard CE8 testing by UAT users being completed.

For Iteration 7 we were asked by the Product Owners to fix smaller outstanding issues or simple enhancements, rather than introducing new features. Some of the following were highlighted and we have undertaken these tasks:

• Build the UAT version of Sakai 2.5 so that we can proceed with testing and prepare it for upgrade later in the year.
• Re-write the assignment submission page so that it allows for submission by more than just UNE users. This includes people in groups, directly added to the unit and without UNE accounts.
• #1322: The Dual login that allows non-UNE students to login doesn’t appear in the DEV, UAT, PROD environments.
• #966: Adding extension requests to eSubmission. This will help simplify management of assignments
• #1918: Extensions Page: Make sortable by name and due date.
• #1919: Extensions Page: Move the box for creating a new extension to the top of the page.
• We need to promote a new copy of sakai to try to correct current performance issues.

For this iteration (5) we committed to the following:

1. We would like to promote current changes production. This would include: MOTD, SPE automation, new offerings service (includes ‘all’ offerings), Rebuilt Site Profile, Assessment return update, new enrolment script for Sakai (so it behaves the same as BB), Coversheets for Coordinators, Groups in assignments, Override co-ordinators logout, Coversheet download for nonUNE users.
2. [#1914] Summary View of eSubmission Assignments.
3. [#2483] Investigate the Student view for staff in eSubmission. We need to discover what kinds of issues staff are encountering without the student view so that we can find a solution that will address the problem.
4. [#1920] Staff Portal Unit List. This to reorganise the list of units presented to staff in their portal view. It is not usable as it is.
5. [#1071] School level access to teaching units/sites. We need to provide greater intelligence within the system about who owns the units. This will allow us to provide access on a broader scale and not just to those directly involve in each unit.
6. [#972] Complete Org manager. The org manager is a part of the system understanding the organisational structure. If we have time we will look at the possible usability issues that may still exists here.
7. #1675: The submission list needs to be sorted (alphabetical or in order of submission).

Commitment Size: 118 points

As usual the items we completed are in bold and as can be seen we unfortunately only completed the promote. This is because the promote process has proven to be very intensive and we have begun investigating what can be done to reduce this. We have however made some progress on the other items:

• The summary area now renders and saves grades, it does not yet provide an output for Callista (though this is quite close) and needs its performance improved. We also have some concerns about ensuring that it is usable in the contexts that currently exist in the community. More scoping and input may be needed here.
• The staff portal is working (but not yet released) and needs some refinement to ensure that the categorisation of units will be helpful.M
• School level access is dependant on the org manager.

Iteration 6

For the next iteration we have commited to a much more simplified set of tasks, in fact it has been simplified to 1:

• Test the new BB CE8 in development:
  • Test integration to ensure enrollment, sso and other integrations will behave as expected after the upgrade.
  • Launch UAT testing, includes: providing UAT test sheet, electing UAT testers, providing UAT help
  • Perform Critical Function Testing and check Critical Function Tests

The Blackboard CE8 Upgrade is being run as a project through the ITD Programme Office. The Project Manager is Nathan Heberly (who can be found in the staff directory) you can direct any questions regarding UAT testing to him.

Commitment: 120

Gerwood

Unfortunately illness struck quite heavily during this sprint and we lost at least a third of our productive time through absense and addition time through lost momentum.
The items below marked in bold are those items successfully completed:

1. [#1071] Complete the coversheet conversion. The elements of the coversheet coversion we didn’t finalise in the last sprint have been deemed as top priority for this sprint
2. [#1914] Summary View of eSubmission Assignments.
3. [#2481] Automate SPE/SETs for eSubmission/blackboard. After investigation it would appear that this is technically feasible. Most of the feedback garnered was further encouragement to do this.
4. [#2483] Investigate the Student view for staff in eSubmission. We need to discover what kinds of issues staff are encountering without the student view so that we can find a solution that will address the problem.
5. [#1920] Staff Portal Unit List. This to reorganise the list of units presented to staff in their portal view. It is not usable as it is.
6. [#1071] School level access to teaching units/sites. We need to provide greater intelligence within the system about who owns the units. This will allow us to provide access on a broader scale and not just to those directly involve in each unit.
7. [#972] Complete Org manager. The org manager is a part of the system understanding the organisational structure. If we have time we will look at the possible usability issues that may still exists here.

Commitment size: 123 points

Of those items we partially completed the Summary View and Staff Portal Unit List.

For the next iteration (5) we have committed to the following:

1. We would like to promote current changes production. This would include: MOTD, SPE automation, new offerings service (includes ‘all’ offerings), Rebuilt Site Profile, Assessment return update, new enrolment script for Sakai (so it behaves the same as BB), Coversheets for Coordinators, Groups in assignments, Override co-ordinators logout, Coversheet download for nonUNE users.
2. [#1914] Summary View of eSubmission Assignments.
3. [#2483] Investigate the Student view for staff in eSubmission. We need to discover what kinds of issues staff are encountering without the student view so that we can find a solution that will address the problem.
4. [#1920] Staff Portal Unit List. This to reorganise the list of units presented to staff in their portal view. It is not usable as it is.
5. [#1071] School level access to teaching units/sites. We need to provide greater intelligence within the system about who owns the units. This will allow us to provide access on a broader scale and not just to those directly involve in each unit.
6. [#972] Complete Org manager. The org manager is a part of the system understanding the organisational structure. If we have time we will look at the possible usability issues that may still exists here.
7. #1675: The submission list needs to be sorted (alphabetical or in order of submission).

Commitment Size: 118 points

For this iteration we undertook to complete the following:

1. Investigate what is necessary to make the system automatically be aware that an SPE/SET/SPS has been granted and maintain access
2. Create the coversheets that will work for une and non-une students alike (this involves re-writing the coversheet producer.
3. Fix the character address rending issue on the return labels for assignments

Estimated Commitment: 118

Due to the nature of some of the changes we have been able to very simply complete a few other stories for ‘free’:

• #1293 Coversheets for coordinators. When promoted coordinators will be able to download a copy of the coversheet for each assignment they receive through esubmission
• #1933 Add groups to assignments. This was done as a part of the student view re-write as a result groups are fully supported through eSubmission.
• #1935 Override coordinators logout. There has been an issue where there are two copies of a submission but the system only tracks one of them. This means that it is unable to account for both submissions being returned.
• #9136 Coversheet download for groups. A student that is in a unit through a group rather than offering (nonUNE users) can now download a coversheet for their assignment.

We didn’t complete the coversheet conversion. We didn’t manage to completely re-build the TLC-Despatch area and it would appear that we underestimated this work. We also need to adjust the print script that sends files to the print system.

For the next iteration (4) we have committed to the following:

1. [#1071] Complete the coversheet conversion. The elements of the coversheet coversion we didn’t finalise in the last sprint have been deemed as top priority for this sprint
2. [#1914] Summary View of eSubmission Assignments.
3. [#2481] Automate SPE/SETs for eSubmission/blackboard. After investigation it would appear that this is technically feasible. Most of the feedback garnered was further encouragement to do this.
4. [#2483] Investigate the Student view for staff in eSubmission. We need to discover what kinds of issues staff are encountering without the student view so that we can find a solution that will address the problem.
5. [#1920] Staff Portal Unit List. This to reorganise the list of units presented to staff in their portal view. It is not usable as it is.
6. [#1071] School level access to teaching units/sites. We need to provide greater intelligence within the system about who owns the units. This will allow us to provide access on a broader scale and not just to those directly involve in each unit.
7. [#972] Complete Org manager. The org manager is a part of the system understanding the organisational structure. If we have time we will look at the possible usability issues that may still exists here.

Commitment size: 123 points.

We have 20 days to complete this work (four weeks). As a result the next meeting dates for this sprint will be:

Demonstration of work complete: 13th August 2pm - 4pm (expectation is it will be at most 1hr)

Planning for Sprint 5: 14th August 10am - 12pm

Thank you to the VLE Ownership committee for their time and expertise in helping as set priorities for this sprint.

Gerwood Stewart
Senior Programmer (VLE Team)
Information Technology Directorate

During this Iteration we didn’t take on any new adjustments to the system. Instead we took three weeks to ensure that we had tests and documentation for the system. This was partially also done in anticipation of the new VLE Ownership group meeting. We didn’t want to continue with anything for the moment until they were brought up to speed.

Included in this was the following:

• Finish Rebuild of Site Profile page. This was a hang over from other iterations that hadn’t quite been completed. We took the time here to ensure that it was completed.
• Fix the student view to render properly. Similar to the Site Profile rebuild this story hadn’t quite been completed. As a result we took some time to finish this. It is now working quite well. A lot of the underlying code has been simplified and unified.
• Tests for Message of the Day
• Tests for Class list
• Tests for Student Assignments lists
• Test for cohorts
• Tests for Site Profile
• Test for Sync Page
• Test for CAUR/Callista switch over
• Test potential of 1.5.4 promote

In all the team wrote close to 150 automated tests (possibly slightly over that). As a result these tests will now be run every time we build the software. This creates a good level of minimum quality as producing each version of the system will include running these tests. We will have much greater visibility on anything failing.

A lot of time has been spent working through the usability of version 1.5.4 which can’t be automated.

Gerwood
Senior Programmer

We have now completed Iteration 2. The following is what we aimed to complete during this iteration. The items we successfully completed are marked in bold:

1. Create S2 units
2. Begin looking at ways to improve the handling of groups/non-UNE enrolments (e.g. newcastle language students)
3. (Postponed) Non-UNE login for eSubmission. There is currently a bug with eSubmission which prevents the login screen from showing we need to resolve this before non-UNE students can gain access
4. Convert Site Profile (this is an internal change to help with future development)
5. (80%) Fix the eSubmission students view (currently this view is not adequate for nonUNE students and some of the purposes lectures would like to put eSubmission to
6. Add an automatic logout mark to a students grades page when uploading files as feedback
7. Create at least 1 video tutorial to help improve understanding of features found in the VLE
8. Adjust file upload names so that they include the students: username, assignment id, submission id and the id for the specific file. This is to help with printing where unusual characters (such as chinese characters) cause printing to fail and to provide clearer labeling for lecturers when they download assignments.

Generally the feeling was that we greatly improved upon the last iteration. We’ve completed most of the elements and narrowly missed the last two. This was partly due to illness and also due to the floods on the coast which stranded one of our team members.

Why was Non-UNE login for eSubmission cancelled?

About 3/4 of the way through the iteration we realised that we couldn’t yet make eSubmission fully available to non-UNE students because there was extra work to complete before it was possible. Specifically the coversheets used for handling hardcopy assignments need to be re-designed to handle non-UNE students. As a result we cancelled the login page as the work wouldn’t serve a useful purpose at this point. We will refocus on that particular item when we have the other elements for non-UNE users completed as it is the last step in including them.

Other work for non-UNE students
Although we haven’t as yet made any code changes we did spend some time investigating the current situation for non-UNE students and looking for ways to improve both the process and the tools that support it. We are continuing to look for the best ways to remove the issues with enrolling these students and ensuring they have equal access. Happily I think this is progressing well, if perhaps a little slowly (and late) for everyone.

Quality Review Iteration 1

For the next iteration we need to promote the changes completed so far to production. As a result the team has decided to dedicate this entire iteration to improving both the promote process and the testing that we do with the code in general. The team is engaging in creating formal tests for all the code we’ve created over the last four weeks and extending their own knowledge of this area of software development.

The aim is not just to ensure the new features and bug fixes are well tested but to improve the teams knowledge of this so it can happen more efficiently during each iteration, hopefully to the point where we no longer need the Quality Review Iterations.

As a result the following is being done during this iteration:

• Each component we have changed is having formal unit tests written.
• Each component is having business specifications written (for what it currently does).
• Each component is having formal user acceptance (functional) tests written which will be used for promoting changes
• Fix the eSubmission students view (currently this view is not adequate for nonUNE students and some of the purposes lectures would like to put eSubmission to
• Create at least 1 video tutorial to help improve understanding of features found in the VLE
• Promote eSubmission 1.5.4 and TLCAdmin 1.5.4

This iteration is set to be completed by: 5/6/09

Gerwood

We have begun a new method for trying to achieve timely and responsive blocks of work within the VLE.

As a result we’ve just finished our first Iteration (a two week commitment of work). It didn’t go as well as we hoped however we did complete the following:

• Added a Message of the Day editor to TLCAdmin
• Adjusted the systems internal class list so that lecturers can see it
• Switch the data source for offerings in TLCAdmin (further explanation below)

These items have been completed fully in development. Although they won’t be seen immediately in Production (because we need to promote the changes) they will arrive the next time we do a promote.

For the next Iteration 2 (sometimes referred to as a sprint) we have undertaken to do the following:

1. Create S2 units (somewhat necessary )
2. Begin looking at ways to improve the handling of groups/non-UNE enrolments (e.g. newcastle language students)
3. Non-UNE login for eSubmission. There is currently a bug with eSubmission which prevents the login screen from showing we need to resolve this before non-UNE students can gain access
4. Convert Site Profile (this is an internal change to help with future development)
5. Fix the eSubmission students view (currently this view is not adequate for nonUNE students and some of the purposes lectures would like to put eSubmission to
6. Add an automatic logout mark to a students grades page when uploading files as feedback
7. Create at least 1 video tutorial to help improve understanding of features found in the VLE
8. Adjust file upload names so that they include the students: username, assignment id, submission id and the id for the specific file. This is to help with printing where unusual characters (such as chinese characters) cause printing to fail and to provide clearer labeling for lecturers when they download assignments.

There are definitely things that have been missed in this iteration. Two I would like to include next time (and would like feedback on) are:

• Adding extension requests to eSubmission. This will help simplify management of assignments
• Add an overview page of all assignments in a unit. This will help prepare for Callista integration and help with both reviewing grades and final results collation

As a note I’m going to add an additional page to this site to show the current backlog (requested work) and the order it is listed in. Anyone wanting to contribute to that list or ask for items to be re-ordered (with justification) can email directly on: gstewar8@une.edu.au or add a comment.

Thanks

Gerwood

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