[sakai2-tcc] [Building Sakai] Assignments 2

Wed Mar 6 13:13:06 PST 2013

Though membership doesn't mean actually doing the technical and
non-technical work. I was persuaded to arrange a BOF in Atlanta (even
though I have no connection to either tool) and did try to find people
afterward for this particular issue though there was no interest. In
communications with Oxford (who were originally interested) they actually
became less interested. So it really just was me, and at the time I wasn't
able to commit any actual time to working on this other than looking for
other people interested in working on or funding this.

I also don't have an *incredibly strong* interest one way or another, I
could care less if Assignment, Assignment2, Assignment Wow or no Assignment
is the best for the core. I guess just would like an official Sakai (TCC)
line that either it is still a desired goal to replace A1 with A2 or it's
never going to be a replacement, then we can work from there. I think after
these tools existing concurrently for over 8 years we might have enough
information to decide one way or anothe. Having two tools really hurts the
community as many new features may get implemented (at great time expense)
for one and not the other (or neither, just sitting out there as ideas).
Also external companies that believe logically that 2 will replace 1 (like
iRubric) [2] have favored the *Assignment 2* version because they believed
it to be the newer more supported version. This generally leaves it up to
the community to add these features (often at very difficult or at least
very great expense) back to the other tool.

If Chuck's -1 remains unchanged it looks to be the latter (never going to
be a replacement), so from there we can put up appropriate warnings; don't
use this in mega sites until someone fixes the performance issues, disable
the back button on known dangerous pages and no new development outside of
IU. (Unless you don't want anyone else to use it)

Wouldn't the fixing of state-related problems also break the (some call it)
unique feature of Sakai that allows for navigation between tools while
still retaining your location within the another tool? Is this a feature
that's finally worth just giving up? (Essentially the tool reset button)

[1]
http://www.prlog.org/11852832-irubric-announces-its-tight-integration-with-sakai-assignment-2.html

On Wed, Mar 6, 2013 at 3:52 PM, Steve Swinsburg
<steve.swinsburg at gmail.com>wrote:

> I think that as part of membership of the TCC, people should be required
> to participate in picking up items like these, and seeing them through.
> Being the coordinator of some item, if you will.
>
> This is what happens in the incubation process (wow I bang on a lot about
> that lately) - people are assigned tools and work with all involved to get
> them over the line. And it is their responsibility to make that happen.
>
> cheers,
> Steve
>
> On 07/03/2013, at 4:57 AM, Neal Caidin <nealcaidin at sakaifoundation.org>
> wrote:
>
> > That's a shame. It sounds like there was momentum from the last
> conference but it did not get sheparded through to make it happen.
> >
> > I'm not sure what next steps make sense, but as they emerge, I am happy
> to help with the coordination/communication/sheparding aspect of things.
> >
> > It also sounds like the sooner the momentum can be recaptured, the
> better. If I come up with any brilliant ideas, I'll let you know. None at
> the moment. My inclination would be to build upon the decision that was
> made by the large group at the last conference rather than revisiting the
> decision, as a general rule of thumb on group agreements. But at this point
> it sounds like there may have been a momentum swing back to Assignments 1.
> I haven't done enough of an analysis myself to have an opinion either way,
> other than the obvious, we should pick one.
> >
> > I can relate to the *sigh*.
> >
> > -- Neal
> >
> >
> >
> > On Mar 6, 2013, at 12:04 PM, "May, Megan Marie" <mmmay at indiana.edu>
> wrote:
> >
> >> *sigh*    I think Matt raised an excellent discussion topic.  There was
> 1 thing that was very clear at last year's BOF at the conference.    People
> thought it was a waste of resources that there were two assignments tools
> and the sentiment of that very large group was that Assignments2 should be
> where the community goes.
> >>
> >> I'm troubled by some of your assertions below:
> >>
> >> (a)  The issue is that community has a resource issue.  There are
> minimal resources working on the CLE as it is and a lot of the work is
> institutionally driven.    Let's not make developers into villains because
> they can't be everything to everyone all the time.
> >> (b)  I'd argue this is an issue of the past.  IU implemented A2
> alongside A1 and there was a utility written that imported the assignments
> from A1 to A2.  I'd also argue that Profile2 also did a good job of this.
> This seems to be a lesson the community has learned from.
> >> (c)  I think that this is an unfair representation of what could
> happen.  There are a lot of other scenarios that could be painted - these
> happen to be very negative ones.
> >> (d)  This concern is in the way these 'replacements' were approached in
> the past.   Looking at Profile 2 I think we've gotten better.
> >>
> >> While things in the past haven't always gone smoothly, I like to think
> that community has started to evolve.  Let's not be afraid of new tools
> because we're scared of past mistakes.
> >>
> >> Megan
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> -----Original Message-----
> >> From: sakai-dev-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org [mailto:
> sakai-dev-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org] On Behalf Of Charles Severance
> >> Sent: Wednesday, March 06, 2013 8:32 AM
> >> To: dev sakai
> >> Cc: sakai2-tcc Committee
> >> Subject: [Building Sakai] Assignments 2
> >>
> >> Matt,
> >>
> >> I strongly disagree with the notion that we should replace Assignments
> with Assignments 2.  Every time in the past we have gone from X to X2 it
> has been a painful experience for several reasons:
> >>
> >> (a) The school that purports to be behind X2 turns out to be less
> committed to supporting the communities needs than the school supporting X1
> once issues are raised with X2.  They are willing to fix things their local
> users find in the product but generally never have resources to fix
> problems other schools find.
> >>
> >> (b) We never get a real conversion - a few schools either hack up a
> conversion or decide to abandon the old data - this might be fine for a few
> adopters making local tradeoffs  - but unacceptable for code in trunk for
> all 300 adopters
> >>
> >> (c) There is never feature parity - ever.   The few schools using X2
> like the additional features and so they turn a blind eye towards what is
> missing and are not motivated to reach feature parity once they have
> switched and told their users "too bad" regarding missing functionality.
> The schools using X2 are happy to compromise because for some reason they
> prefer the new.
> >>
> >> (d) Given that X2 is in a few places things like performance or scaling
> issues are seldom identified until we we drop X2 in trunk and folks upgrade
> and wake up with a surprised look on their face the first week of the
> semester when it all goes pear-shaped.   At that moment, the "fans" of X2
> seem to vanish and are unwilling to fix the problems that crop up.
> >>
> >> Believe me, if we set our minds to it, we could fix the state-related
> problems in Assignments 1 in a few weeks as long as folks were wiling to do
> a complete and thorough QA / regression test of the code.   We would have
> multi-tab capabilities - and eliminate these ghostly bugs that come from
> weird click patterns.   And it would take a month.   If we went to A2, it
> would take at least a year before the pain was over.  And smart schools
> would delay upgrade to our next release, waiting for the brave few to work
> out the kinks of A2.  It is like a poison pill for our next release when we
> are trying very hard to get more schools close to the current release and
> make it easier to keep up with latest releases.
> >>
> >> If we don't have the resources / energy to QA state-rlated changes to
> A1 - then we absolutely do not have the resources to bring the A2 code to
> the level of A1 and build a seamless transition.
> >>
> >> Those who like Assignments 2 can run it - lets not regress trunk.  Lets
> not make things much worse because we are afraid to fix a bug.  If we break
> core functionality - it is one way to force resources to be invested - but
> it is a bad way to do it.
> >>
> >> /Chuck
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