Technology Center
Methodology
January 19, 2016
Sandbox Server
Minor updates to operating system and software on our web servers happen during regular maintenance and can be applied in place (generally with zero downtime). But large version changes have to be handled differently. We have several major upgrades to explore. Upgrades CentOS Until this year UW had an education license for Redhat Enterprise Linux….
June 22, 2015
Educ: Unified Application Infrastructure
The College of Education has somewhere between nine and a dozen (depends how you count them) distinct information system applications. Building these applications separately had some advantages. It kept the domain logic specific, gave a clear context to design decisions, prevented cross system bugs, and let us keep iterating on and improving our framework. But…
June 8, 2015
Appreview Plus
Our existing online applicant review system (SOARS) was built as a view on top of the live Graduate School application data. When you look at the detail page of an applicant in SOARS, a big chunk of what you see gets queried real time from MyGrad. This met the original specifications and has the nice…
Ticket First
Our initial requirement for the Business Operations database (Bizops) was to implement an electronic version of the travel form. This was a complex process that frequently required back and forth revision so it was identified by the college process improvement group as a first place to focus. The Bizops system was built using code from…
March 4, 2015
Spring Quarterly Roadmap Feedback
Below is a summary of the feedback received from our first quarterly roadmap meeting. Those present at the meeting included members of the Academic Staff Team, Fiscal and HR, Grants team, Office of Student Services, Technology Office, Teacher Education, Associate Dean. Feedback solicited included information about subject matter experts and considerations for development with respect to…
February 6, 2015
Requirements, Stories & Epics
Good requirements are critical to building quality software efficiently. Having shared strategies to define and document requirements helps users, subject matter experts, and developers build a shared understanding of what is needed. Stories User stories are a strategy for describing requirements for a small contained feature. By convention stories include a role, an action, and…
Epics
Epics describe the top level goals and projects of the college for information system development. We’ve proposed a prioritized list of how urgent these epics are to the college, but we will seek feedback about this prioritization in face-to-face meetings including our quarterly roadmap planning meeting. This list and the priority order will continue to be…
February 4, 2015
Agile Development
We are currently adopting an Agile Development strategy for work on the College Information Systems. There are many definitions of Agile Development; below is our planned implementation of this methodology. Two Week Cycles We will plan and execute information system development work in two week cycles. Larger projects will be broken down into smaller deliverable chunks. At…