Category: Work Reviews

09/28/2015 — 10/09/2015

This cycle will be returning to Appreview Plus with the goal of switch to this system in November. Appreview Plus is a new implementation of our online applicant review system that decouples us from the Grad School data feed allowing us to keep access to historical data, support local application (applications not through MyGrad) and better integrate with student data in STEP.

Work Complete

Appreview Plus

• OSS degree/GPA evaluation
• Set advisor
• Upload a transcript
• Links to UW / MyGrad policy documents
• Manage Application Material. Add OSS evaluations and upload material attachments. Quick edit toggles for Material complete and contingency.
• Coursework: missing coursework displayed on Application detail page. Management tools to create courses and default course collections by Path. OSS tools for marking courses incomplete and/or contingency.
• Upload recommendation attachment
• Show test scores from TestScore repository in Appreview. This includes official ACT/SAT from UW SDB.
• Set final decision tool and set advisor tool accessible from Application detail page.
• Reviewer dashboard with graph visualization of review progress and decisions. Interactively click on graph or headings to see mini report of applicants (Admits, Denies, My Advisees, etc).

Courses

• Accurately distribute credit hours for independent study course in faculty activity report

Grants

• Grants update process adjusted for changes to Grants data in UW EDW.

Person

• Merge person record tools. We import person information from multiple systems and sometimes don't have shared identifiers. Tool to merge Person records throughout the system, search for existing records and does automatic merging nightly, has user interface for manual merging. Keeps merge history log.
• Update Applicant records from UW SDB (via EDW) in nightly maintenance routine.

Recruitment

• New recruitment half-sheet for at event workflow.

Student

• Add milestone for completed 27 dissertation credits
• Merge R&I milestones
• Milestone changes for Doctoral Supervisory Committee and Reading Committee moved to production.

Testscores

• Add applicant population to ACT/SAT import from UW SDB.

Work Planned

Appreview Plus

• OSS degree/GPA evaluation
• Set advisor
• Upload a transcript
• Links to UW / MyGrad policy documents
• Material OSS evaluation
• Upload material attachment
• Display coursework
• Coursework edit tools
• Upload recommendation attachment
• UW official test scores
• Set final decision

Courses

• Accurately distribute credit hours for independent study course in faculty activity report

Student

• Add milestone for completed 27 dissertation credits
• Merge R&I milestones

08/31/2015 — 09/11/2015

We merged cycles 17 & 18 into a super cycle. Paul had vacation so it was shortened. Additionally we were working on Test Score repository which ended up being a very fluid (figure out the requirements as we built it) kind of project. We have a the functional base of test score repository working that will support our reporting process for PESB (Washington State Professional Educator Standards Board).

Work Complete

Courses

• Report of all courses with any tags and a list of all the tags each course has

Students

• Fixed a problem with import of initial advisors from Applicant Review. Added this as an automated job.
• Corrected endorsement addition certificate type
• More readable view of doctoral supervisory committees. Separate view of reading committee.
• Added longitude and latitude to placement institutions in STEP to support visualizations of teacher placements in Tableau.

Recruitment

• Tool to import a spreadsheet of prospective students into recruitment database (eg. sign up sheets from events and info sessions, shared data from other organizations).

Test Scores

• Imported all available test score data including WEST-B, WEST-E, NES, ACTFL, Praxis, and edTPA from data files provided by testing agencies and ACT and SAT from UW test score data.
• Provide summary counts of test scores in system by type along with percentage that have been matched to college person records.
• Use SDB system key in test score import fields to match test scores to person records
• Search for test scores by person. Searches college person records (students & applicants) and also person information found in test score import files.
• Test score detail view
• Forms to add test scores to system. Forms for each test score type that provides custom fields appropriate to that test score.
• Created a user interface for defining certificate and endorsement requirement rules and defining evidence rules which specify the test scores that satisfy requirements.
• Provided SQL queries so evidence for PESB reporting can be extracted from database.

Infrastructure

• Migrated this blog from UW Blog Network to College of Education center/dept server

Work Planned

Test Scores

• Import all files in Google Drive sample files, review import code for ongoing usage
• Import SAT and ACT from UW data
• UI to create Requirements, Requirement Rules, and Evidence Rules

08/17/2015 — 08/28/2015

Work Complete

Appreview Plus

• Page titles (in Appreview Plus and in Budgets and Person)
• Recently viewed in application menu
• Application deadlines
• Display application review committee. Tools to set recommendation and scholarship
• Tool to add a comment
• Faculty dashboard view – set up and first couple elements, more to come
• Academic Support Team tools for set final decision and set advisor
• Report system with parameters (Report object query the database for related data to display on web pages and have parameters that can be adjusted for context or by the user)

Courses

• Allow course numbers to be reused over time. Review system for any place where curriculum abbreviation and course number are assumed to identify a course and include effective year and quarter. Put in back-log for other work
• GUI to set the update through quarter, start UW Time Schedule update process, and provide info about who changed setting and if update is currently running.
• Further refinements to application configuration system that incorporates database settings

Grants

• Improve grant data import process to prioritize “Principal Investigator” over other grant roles.

Students

• Refine PESB placement editing tools for actual work flows. Decided to change this from a “defaults” tool to a bulk edit tool.
• Placement tool that creates or edits a placement record for each student in a cohort.

Test Scores

• Sync student data from STEP to Person database
• Modify update process to match existing test score records and not insert duplicates
• Build person matching routine that compares person data from import files to students and applicants in our system are relates test scores to the correct people
• Plan Requirement entities and rules for automatically applying Evidence to Requirements.

Work Planned

Appreview Plus

• Page titles
• Recently viewed in application menu
• Application deadlines
• Set recommendation and scholarship
• Faculty dashboard view
• Academic Support Team tools for set final decision and set advisor
• OSS workflow tools for needs decision and needs update in MyGrad

Courses

• Report of all courses with any tag and list of all tags those courses have
• Allow course numbers to be reused over time. Review system for any place where curriculum abbreviation and course number are assumed to identify a course and include effective year and quarter.
• GUI to set the update through quarter, start UW Time Schedule update process, and provide info about who changed setting and if update is currently running.
• Further refinements to application configuration system that incorporates database settings

Test Scores

• Sync student data from STEP to Person database
• Modify update process to match existing test score records and not insert duplicates
• Build person matching routine that compares person data from import files to students and applicants in our system are relates test scores to the correct people
• Plan Requirement entities and rules for automatically applying Evidence to Requirements.

08/03/2015 — 08/14/2015

Work Complete

Appreview Plus

• Map out full transition from SOARS to Appreview Plus with timeline
• Show attachments and make them downloadable
• Add comments pane to application detail and add comment tool
• Tool to edit deadlines when rules based deadlines are wrong
• Fixed application degree dates display

Courses

• Change division configuration for new Associate Dean
• Fix parameter header for Courses by ROU report
• Remove reference to comments “under construction” in offering detail About tab

Grants

• Fixed proposal download did not include the same records as proposal HTML report

Students

• Automated update. SME readable documentation (flow chart?) shows where data comes from and how statuses are decided.
• Update pre 2014 Field Placement PESB data with required hours, weeks, and placement type information
• Fix PESB default table year-qtr sorting function
• Add link to edit placement institutions tool

Test Scores

• Build test score repository in database tables
• Build import process for existing test score spreadsheets

Work Planned

• Appreview Plus
• Courses
• Grants
• Students
• Test Scores

07/20/2015 — 07/31/2015

Work Complete

Appreview Plus

• Complete automated update process
• Fix person import – names getting replaced with external reviewer names
• Promote to production – activate daily Grad School updates
• De-activate SOARS secondary update process for ap_* tables. Make appreview tables in EDUC database the authoritative tables
• Refine application detail view. Build a UI vocabulary for sections.

Courses

• Include all general education requirements
• Get Term data from UW Student Web Service
• Add details of repetition rules to download CSV file
• Fix offering headers on pages where header has gray background
• Tool to create more offerings based on repetition rules
• Fix ROU Undergraduate and Professional filters cross linked

Work Planned

• Appreview Plus
• Courses
• Students – planned work missed, moved to Cycle 15

07/06/2015 — 07/17/2015

Work Complete

Appreview Plus

• Completed fully automated import of SOARS application data to the Appreview Plus system. Allows us to adjust and rebuild and prepares for smooth deployment when ready to go live.
• Email modules and message conversion utility. Breaks email messages and templates, stored in SOARS as messy string data into atomic parts to support more sophisticated handling.
• Reviewer committee system. Allows reuse of reviewer groups for multiple program/degrees.
• Grad School web service connection uses current implementation with better logging and error handling.
• Logging system through event architecture. Application model supportive of both MyGrad based applications and local applications.
• Search tool for applications. Searches on name, UW NetID, and year/quarter of application.
• Application detail page rough out. Display the data that was imported to the new system.
• Deployed to development server so SMEs can begin reviewing web views.

Courses

• Improved UW Time Schedule linking system by displaying full list of course matches. In the past hidden sections (canceled or linked to another UWTS section) caused mistakes during quarterly linking process.

Grants

• Simplified grant person list so same person is not listed multiple times.
• Add budget end date to detail view.
• Report of awards where original award end date does not match related budget end date. (On development, to be deployed with SME approval.)

Students

• Meet with SME for STEP open issues  and faculty needs.
• STEP student import, review of current process. Begin planning for automated student import process.
• Fix for import process where modern style email addresses (something@uw.edu) were missed.
• Refining the import of Doctoral Committee data from Grad School. Now running this on a weekly basis.

Work Planned

Work continues on Appreview Plus. We know from previous projects that significant changes to a database can’t be done gradually, experimentally, and implemented using documentation. Large database transformations need to be automated so they can be triggered with a single command. We need to be able to build and test in one environment and when we are ready deploy in production. The build process needs to be run multiple times, reset, and retested so we know it works. Last cycle we built the transition infrastructure and completed coding for about 1/3 of the tables. Rest will be completed this cycle.

We got an exciting win under our belt by implementing an automated update for Grants data. Next we want to update student data automatically and nightly. This is a more complex update process, and we want it modular and configurable, so this cycle will be focused on requirements gathering, analysis of current manual process, and design.

• Appreview Plus
• Courses
• Grants
• Students

 

 

06/22/2015 — 07/03/2015

Work Complete

Appreview Plus

• Created database migrations. Database “Migrations” are the application code that create database tables. By implementing these in code we can run them systematically on various environments, check them into version control, make them DBMS platform agnostic.
• Implemented “Old Applicant Data” as array structures contained in DataSource module with classes for each data type. This gives a segregated layout to the code that is easier to understand and utilize.
• Import process created for about 1/3 of the Appreview tables. This work will continue in next cycle.
• Did not complete search tool or applicant detail page, planned for next cycle.

Budgets

• Editable food approval flag, set by fiscal staff, based on COE policy, displayed along side UW food policy value. (Completed in DEV, waiting for SME approval.)

Courses

• Get Term data filled out through AY 2017-18 from UW Calendar.
• Improved UWTS linking, show all the matching sections including deleted and already linked. Completed Winter 2016 import and linking with new tool.

Grants

• Update grant data nightly using automated import from UW Enterprise Data Warehouse. (Development complete, needs to be deployed in production.)

Educ

• Created a base form handler class that simplifies form development in future projects. Provides structure for user input scrubbing, validation, error handling and storage.
• Fixed bug – application index page now accessible by anyone logged in with UW NetID.

Students

• Fix problem where current registration tool does not show course names. Significant revision of Web Service Client code: central configuration, much better error logging, more flexible exception handling, consistent interface across implementations, all using JSON representations.
• Refined Doc Committee import process added more automation so it can be run on a weekly basis.
• Added Program views for ECFS Teaching & Learning option.

Reporting and Information Dashboards

• Install Tableau and connect to UW Server
• Design 2015 Undergraduate Survey data visualizations, results located here.

Infrastructure

• More refinements to Builder utility. Builder generates skeleton application code for entity classes based on database structure. Long term time saver automates routine repetitive work.

Work Planned

Cycle 12 is our last two week work cycle we are calling part of Spring Quarter work. Our quarterly review and planning meeting for Summer 2015 is Tuesday, 6/23, 2:00 PM in Miller 215.

Previous work on Appreview Plus has been planning and low level. This cycle we want to get a couple items done that users can see, touch, give feedback on.

New heading below for “Educ” which is our shared application infrastructure. We expect Educ to give us better results, more quickly, with greater consistency across applications. Read more about the Educ: Unified Application Infrastructure.

• Appreview Plus
• Courses
• Grants
• Educ
• Students
• Reporting and Information Dashboards

06/08/2015 — 06/19/2015

Work Complete

Work deviated from plan a bit this cycle as the complexities of the Appreview Plus database migration became clearer. Added a side task of a “Builder” utility which will pay off in efficiency and accuracy over the long term.

Starting to refer to our unified application platform that currently houses the Person and Budget project and will house Appreview Plus as “EDUC”.

Appreview Plus

• Prepare the unified EDUC project to handle large contexts starting with applicant data. Structure code to have logical segregation of subject matter, while sharing infrastructure. Revise application to find all the existing code in new context organization.
• Database plan with Entity Relationship Diagram: Restructure application data to be compatible with Grad School application and handle purely local applications. Rename tables and columns to follow unified EDUC database conventions. Unify repetitive tables in applicant data into standard tables that can be used accross unified EDUC database including activity log, email, comments, attachments.
• Convert ERD into migrations – write application code that creates database tables
• Email plan – handle existing applicant email history and provide more complete logging going forward
• Create plan for importing old incomplete applicant data: Bring all data where we have a Grad School applicant record in XML. Bring older records where we have link to UW institutional data example: the applicant has a SDB system key or a UW NetID.

Budgets

• Didn’t get food approval complete. This triggered some work to form handling infrastructure in EDUC project which needs to be completed first. Food approval will get taken care of in the upcoming cycle.

Students

• Refined career import job title merging logic for new titles in this year’s Seattle Public Schools data

Techsupport

• Add configurable room entity to classroom check utility
• Removed Do Not Reply message from Help Desk emails, going full release with email ingestion
• Added editable footer to email

Infrastructure

• Builder utility is a PHP application that writes PHP application code. A certain portion of our application code is predictable based on structure of tables in the database. Instead of repetatively writing out three or four files we created the Builder utility that takes the database structure as input and output the framework of the application code. This save coding time simply by generating the core file, but the big time savings is in the consistency and accuracy of programmatically generated code.
• MRBS Room Schedule tool on application context menu
• Standardize new unified EDUC app search menu and page context level menu. Implement menus responsively for small (mobile) screen sizes.

Work Planned

• Appreview Plus
• Bizops
• Budget
• Person
• Student Database
• Tech Support
• Infrastructure

 

05/25/2015 — 06/05/2015

Work Complete

This cycle continued to focus on Appreview Plus. Significant work discovering how this is working now and how it should work going forward.

In Business Operations system we worked on implementing Ticket First.

School of Social Work is going to uses our Courses Database at their unit and we provided a little help getting them oriented and took the opportunity to get our documentation refreshed.

Appreview

• Move updater code (part of the application that scans Grad School web service and discovers application data) to the new EDUC system. Some revisions and testing to existing import processes (Person, Budget).
• Restructure EDUC project to contain multiple contexts (Person, Budget, Appreview).
  Create Appreview entities and repository classes.
• Plan map of existing data, table by table, to new system.

Business Operations

• Build Ticket First migration script.
• Continued work implementing Ticket First. Deployed working version to dev for QA and user testing.

Courses

• Delete UW Time Schedule records and child record routines, utility to clean up bad duplicate data.
• Merge person record tool. Simple fast GUI for combining multiple repetitive person records into a single data point.
• Refreshed documentation.

Recruitment

• Fixed bug in bulk email tool.

Students (STEP)

• Mentor payment report fixed and revised.

Infrastructure

• Review big picture documents with stakeholders

Cycle 9: 05/11/2015 — 05/22/2015

Work Planned

This cycle we are beginning work on the long planned rebuild of the applicant review system. This project paves the way for a long set of important features including integration with student views, historical data, and undergraduate applications. Work on this project will continue into the summer.

• Applicant Review
• Business Operations
• Budgets
• Courses
• Grants
• Help Desk Tickets
• Person
• Infrastructure

Work Complete

Business Operations

• Worked on “Ticket First” strategy for business operations database. System will expose a core request handling system similar to Help Desk ticket system. Tickets provide the structure: ticket number, requester, staff assigned, status, collection of messages. Forms will be specific structured data attached to tickets.

Budget

• Budget status on list view
• Budget status as search term
• Download budget lists
• Display assigned fiscal manager in grants system
• Search last 4 digits of budget number

Courses

• List offerings with no instructor

Person

• Fix person update and schedule nightly updates

Help Desk

• Email ingestion, emails are received by system and added as messages to tickets
• Added primary email field to ticket system for non UW users

Applicant Review

• Work started on move to local application data, information gathering and planning.
• Requirements gathering meetings with OSS, AST, TEP
• Responsive menu changes from top of page menu to left hand sidebar based on screen size, makes applications more mobile friendly
• Reviewed database options, decided on shared database to simplify data reuse and reporting
• Built migration from existing applicant database to shared database
• New development environment authorized for web service with Grad School
• Select platform for revised applicant review, will share platform with People/Budget system, and started project

Infrastructure

• Rename Pubcookie application contexts to avoid cookie too large error
• Upgrade techwiki and coewiki software
• Add info system context menu to all systems, provide link to various tools such as applicants, students, grants, etc.