[sakai2-tcc] [Building Sakai] Assignments Shows Wrong Submission For Student

Wed Mar 6 07:35:34 PST 2013

I would nuance this by saying that we have a less than stellar refactoring record and that part of that is due to a now-ill-fitted contribution pattern.

For a technical example, rather than fixing the amount of "business logic" that happens in some of the velocity templates, we have replicated it in multiple places like Entity Providers. Instead of adding some modularity (extracting classes and methods), we have kept adding to mega-classes and mega-methods with dozens and dozens of nested classes and conditionals.

I agree with Aaron here but won't stop at a criticism of those who have actually worked very hard to maintain some of the most important functionality we've built over nearly a decade (or address above concerns by exploring rewrite options) -- truly honorable service.

It is exceedingly clear to me that the simplification from the early days that an institution "owns" a tool (in name, practice, or simply appearance) has been hurting us for years. It was helpful long ago when there were focused groups from specific institutions building out big pieces of functionality and we were establishing a lot of technical and social groundwork.

I think the time has come for the TCC to have an important and overdue conversation about how we organize ourselves and contributions to the project. This is not to say we sit around for a few days and then tell everybody we've decided on a new set of rules. But we share enough expertise and history to make objective analysis and sketch a better, flatter model (technically and bureaucratically). I really don't think we'll get much objection to suggesting that we reduce the friction in the system.

Now, let me get specific. I think we should fold a lot of the largely tacit and overlapping  "project teams" together and simplify our commit privilege rules and communication channels. This doesn't mean anyone just decides on feature changes and jams them into, say, Assignments unchecked. But it does mean that people should feel empowered to work on the bits that are important to them with a reasonable review (probably by the same people as now) of things that change behavior. It means that looking for high level institutional coordination to "solve the resource problem" with more rules and "firm commitments" has proven to leave us high and dry, while the boundary lines just reenforce this unhealthy feudalism. Largely, it is the reason we have so many fork/rewrite efforts.

I also think we should make a series of complexity reductions in packaging and in areas we've dreaded working on for years (e.g., SiteAction). I won't go into full detail here of all the flattening I think we should undergo, but I do think it's time to start. The TCC should provide more value than voting record on release dates.

Thanks,
-Noah

On Mar 6, 2013, at 8:32 AM, Aaron Zeckoski <azeckoski at unicon.net> wrote:

> My opinion is that the work involved to bring A2 up to feature parity
> with A1 is far far greater than the work to add some A2 improvements
> to A1. I suggest we consider this a lesson in forking tools and try
> hard to not fork anymore in the future and instead focus on continuous
> and gradual improvements to A1.
> 
> -AZ
> 
> 
> On Wed, Mar 6, 2013 at 8:26 AM, Berg, Alan <A.M.Berg at uva.nl> wrote:
>> How much energy Adam does it take to migrate back compared to extend Assignments 2. Is this a case of sharing work with other interested parties to finally make a better tool.
>> 
>> Regards,
>>           Alan
>> 
>> 
>> Alan Berg
>> 
>> Innovation working group
>> On the use of ICT in Education & Research
>> University of Amsterdam
>> 
>> ________________________________________
>> From: sakai2-tcc-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org [sakai2-tcc-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org] on behalf of Adam Marshall [adam.marshall at it.ox.ac.uk]
>> Sent: 06 March 2013 10:57
>> To: Beth Kirschner; sakai2-tcc Committee; dev sakai
>> Cc: Jill Fresen
>> Subject: Re: [sakai2-tcc] [Building Sakai] Assignments Shows    Wrong   Submission For Student
>> 
>> This issue is of great importance to us, we've just done a pilot of Assignments 2 and even though it went down well we have decided to stick with Assignments 1 because there are too many missing features in the newer tool.
>> 
>> We are intending to back-port the best bits of 2 to 1 such as the display of assigned groups alongside assignment titles.
>> 
>> Our perception is that Assignments 2 is a dead end, despite the fact it is clearly a superior tool.
>> 
>> It would be great if somebody could convince us we've made the wrong decision in the next couple of week.
>> 
>> adam
>> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: sakai-dev-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org [mailto:sakai-dev-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org] On Behalf Of Beth Kirschner
>> Sent: 05 March 2013 21:38
>> To: sakai2-tcc Committee; dev sakai
>> Subject: Re: [Building Sakai] [sakai2-tcc] Assignments Shows Wrong Submission For Student
>> 
>> On Mar 5, 2013, at 2:13 PM, Matthew Jones <matthew at longsight.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> 
>>> Some questions I guess.
>>>      * Is Michigan still providing support for A1 or is it (like nearly every other tool) being dropped onto the CLE Team? The default assignee is "Umich Developers" and many are assigned as such but some tickets are being reassigned to CLE Team or others. (This doesn't matter to me either way, just if Michigan isn't exclusively supporting this as in the past it makes more of a case for replacement)
>> Michigan hasn't dropped support for 'nearly every other tool', though perhaps what you really meant to say is that nearly every other tool is now supported by the CLE team, which has been discussed as the preferred direction (from my recollection), and that developers shouldn't consider themselves "silo'd" in their support of a single tool.
>> 
>> Michigan continues to be listed as the default JIRA assignee for a few tools (e.g. Assignments, Site-Manage), and I've been taking the effort to triage new tickets assigned to Michigan and if it's not critical and/or not something we can work on in the near-term, I've been re-assigning them to the CLE team. This doesn't mean we're not supporting these tools, but instead we're broadening the scope of our Sakai support. We have several new features in development or already checked in for the site-manage tool (e.g. SAK-22450 and SAK-16600), as well as active support in the Kernel, Announcements and Basic LTI, Portal, user-preferences, and contrib tools.
>> 
>> We could remove Michigan as the default assignee for any Sakai tools, but I feel there is benefit to the community to triage these tickets. What other institutions are doing this? Neal has been quietly asking some TCC members to review outstanding JIRA tickets (including myself), and perhaps we should change the expectation of the default JIRA assignee to be the person/group who triages the tickets rather than the one who is silo'd in support of only that tool? This might be a path to getting more tickets reviewed and re-assigned to people or institutions who have can more quickly work on them?
>> 
>> There's also benefit in an honest assessment of how much Michigan can actually do, and if there's room for the community to step in, I think it's helpful to be clear as to where that help can/should be focused.
>> 
>>>      * Is IU or anyone else other than Longsight still interested in working on getting A2 into core? Either technical (development/UI work) or non-technical (gap analysis/filing issues) help would be useful.
>>> There were nearly 25 people in the session at the last conference, and I was reluctant to hold another similar one because of the lack of progress or anything new to report.
>>> 
>> I think the last conference showed there was significant interest in having just one Assignments tool, but no-one seemed able to contribute the resources to close the gap between the two tools (everyone seemed to walk away from that BOF thinking 'the other guy' was going to work on it). Frustrating for all, and perhaps worth another BOF to re-frame the question of not who would like to see this happen but who has resources they can commit to a cross-institutional team that would work on this. Would Longsight be willing to coordinate this effort?
>> 
>> - Beth
>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On Tue, Mar 5, 2013 at 1:46 PM, Charles Severance <csev at umich.edu> wrote:
>>> 
>>> On Mar 5, 2013, at 11:52 AM, Matthew Jones wrote:
>>> 
>>>> I reported this ticket a few days ago, sounds similar:
>>>> https://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/SAK-23247 (When grading students, if you press the back button, some of the form is incorrect)
>>>> 
>>>> I spent about an hour looking at the code and couldn't see where this was happening. We were just going to add a lock on the back button to avoid it being used as that was the only way I could reproduce this. It's got to be something with the state and context not being in sync.
>>> 
>>> Is it time to bite the bullet and take this stuff out of state in Assignments???
>>> 
>>> /Chuck
>>> 
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> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Aaron Zeckoski - Software Architect - http://tinyurl.com/azprofile
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