Iteration 2 Complete
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:
- Create S2 units
- Begin looking at ways to improve the handling of groups/non-UNE enrolments (e.g. newcastle language students)
- (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
- Convert Site Profile (this is an internal change to help with future development)
- (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
- Add an automatic logout mark to a students grades page when uploading files as feedback
- Create at least 1 video tutorial to help improve understanding of features found in the VLE
- 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