2006-03-07 Agenda and Notes

Weekly Meeting Agenda for 07-Mar-2006

In attendance: Marc, Ray, Duffy, Daphne, Daisy

Agenda

• phase 1/Fall '06 requirements, revisited
• update on UC-Davis meeting, committer status, etc.
• review "coarse" project plan
• schedule deadline for for "semi-granular" design and development project plan
  • schedule time for Duffy and developers to flush out more detailed task plan
• comments on proposed "team" breakdown http://bugs.sakaiproject.org/confluence/display/CM/Team
  • other people to add/subtract?

Notes

Marc: Met with Makoto and Jackie to revisit Stanford's most essential requirements for Fall '06. The biggest pressure is to support cross-listed courses, where "support" means that the component course memberships are visibly distinguishable.

Ray: If the current section aware UI can stay the same, short-term support for that might be doable without derailing the project. We need to focus the target as much as possible. Best would be no UI changes in applications, a restricted target customer (Casey as Stanford integrator), and an agreement that the integration code would have to change in '07.

Daphne: UC Berkeley has other priorities as high, such as displaying student IDs instead of just Sakai usernames. But management has made the decision that our resources shouldn't go into the legacy tools, and so we're planning to live with the current limitations for Fall '06. Final grade submission also has too much involved to fit into the next few months. Fall '07 is where we count on a big win for our effort.

Ray: Since we don't want to divert our staff into throw-away integration work, UC Berkeley probably wouldn't get involved with the automatic section creation for cross-listing support.

Duffy: We'd better make it clear to enterprise customers that we aren't offering a full or stable solution.

Marc: The pain may be worth it to Stanford. It would be a big win to support cross-listed courses in Fall '06.

Ray: Some discussion of the project's different customers: 1) The "end users": instructors, students, TAs. Their needs drive all the other work, but sometimes the deliverables are indirect. The direct deliverables are specified by traditional functional specs and wireframes. 2) Enterprise integrators. They express their needs differently, and the negotiated contracts include APIs, performance and scalability targets, data structure diagrams, and OOTB integration approaches. 3) Application programmers. The negotiated contracts are usually expressed as documented APIs.

Daphne: In Arizona, we asked instructors about how their courses and sections were structured, but we didn't put it in terms of integration staff. So who is responsible for the requirements for enterprise integrators?

Ray: Josh, Mark, and I have been doing more of the outreach and coordination on enterprise integrator requirements; we are responsible.

Marc: OK, this breakdown of responsibilities is helpful to understand. It brings us back to that somewhat muddled and confusing discussion we had a couple weeks ago about "use cases". Some use cases overlap customers, e.g. an integrator use case that assumes some behavior for an end-user downstream. Also, use cases can get expressed in different forms. It would be great to have a common expression.

Daphne, Marc, Duffy: We need to make sure the various sorts of requirements are all closely associated and use common terminology.

Marc: Finding a way to express the requirements for different customers through a common document and use case pattern is what I'd like to shoot for.

Daphne: Worried about getting the schedule and timing more firmly established. She's already spending more than that 10 hours a week.

Duffy: The developers should get to work on an initial task breakdown and plan. Josh is back from vacation on March 15, and we'll try to set up a March 16 meeting. In the interim, Duffy and Ray will start work on it.

Marc: How's the distinction between the "Working Team" and the "Review Team" look?

Duffy: The idea is to give the occasional-but-valuable contributors an officially visible role.

All: Looks good.

Ray: Cheryl Wogahl has agreed to provide someone like that for Yale. Josh contacted Charles Hedrick from Rutgers, but never heard back. Maybe Mark N. should get in touch with him, too?

Duffy: It may just be that he's already assigned the reviewer task to Bob Crosby.

Marc: No time for the UC Davis update.

Ray: The last two meetings indicate that we either need to keep a closer eye on the agenda or we need to expand the meeting time.