UMCM: One Institution’s Implementation Experience with Kuali Curriculum Management

Michelle Appel – Functional Lead | UMD, College Park

Joseph Drasin – Project Manager | UMD, College Park

Garey Taylor – Technical Lead | UMD, College Park

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Large “flagship” University 12 Colleges, over 100 departments

150+ programs of study, depending on definition

26,000+ undergraduates, 10,000+ grad students

~8,000 employees including ~ 1,500 T/Tk faculty

Growing Kuali Community on campus Rice & COEUS (MIT) in production

KFS in Development

COEUS & OLE in early stages

Legacy, homegrown SIS on a mainframe Challenges with ability to sustain expertise on technology

Difficulty continuing to meet changing campus needs

University of Maryland

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Team based in College Park, MD, South Africa, and Vancouver, BC

KS 1.2.2 codebase (this is incorporated into CM 2.0)

Focused year 1 implementation on course proposal and approval Create a course

Modify a course

Retire a course

Workflow

Authorization

Dependency analysis

….(ADD)

Project Introduction

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Large multi-disciplinary distributed team

Structural evolution

Support of operations and ongoing development

Current Structure Data Team (Functional & Technical)

Software Development Team

Functional Working Group (including UI)

Quality Assurance

Documentation and Training

Rice coordination team *NEW*

Organizational structure

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Hybrid Upfront Waterfall Style Requirements Gathering

Dedicated Business Analysts

Dedicated Subject Matter Experts

Agile Style Development Two Week Sprints

Daily Standups

Product Owner Priority Meetings

Sprint Retrospectives

Agile in Production Balancing O&M with new development

Development Methodologies

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Major Milestones 7/21/2011 Project Kickoff 8/26/2011 Milestone 0 “Infrastructure” 11/1/2011 Milestone 1 “The Plumbing” 12/13/2011 Milestone 2 “Soft Launch” 1/31/2012 Milestone 3 “Production Build” 3/29/2012 “Go-Live” – First record processed July 2012 Major Release (Retire by Proposal) August 2012 Became system of record August 2012 Major Release (VPAC Agenda) October 2012 Major Release (Dependency Analysis)

Where are we today Onboarding and training additional colleges Adding new features and bug fixing Preparing for CM 2.0 implementation Looking into how CM fits into ENR (particularly with data)

Project Timeline

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Fantastic

Busy

Tedious

Slow

Tenuous

Hectic

Chaotic

Amazing

What is it like being live

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Where We Came From – Course Proposal

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Where We Came From – Course Lookup

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Public Site – www.testudo.umd.edu/ks

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Data work – mapping, clean-up, loading

Localization UI

Syntax

Fields

Authorization setup

Workflow

Rules Configuration – types, categories

Data entry

Retire a course

Summary of Major areas of Work

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Management Operations + Development = Less Sleep

Be Flexible

Communication and coordination with functional stakeholders is key

Set manageable (small) scope Set expectations

Prepare for the unexpected (technically and functionally)

Stick to time box – Don’t go off the rails

High visibility, but low volume use and impact

System of record issues will need to be addressed

Lessons Learned – Management

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Functional Data work is a huge effort – start early

Sometimes you don't know enough to make the decisions Development possibilities and directions

Changing campus needs and business processes

Software has features campus wants, but isn’t ready for

Timing of functional input can be challenging “Hurry up and wait”

Dedicated analysis time

Find forgiving functional users – testers, pilot users

Be open to new collaboration tools, willing to adjust midstream

Develop an outward facing site

Get Rice expertise – functional and technical

Lessons Learned – Functional

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Technical Development Methodologies

Development Environment Setup Development Tools (Confluence, Jira, Bamboo)

Local Overlay Project (Coding Environment)

Kuali Student 1.2.1

Server Environments

Data Load Testing

Authorization

Running in Production

Lessons Learned – Technical

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Local Overlay Project KS 1.2.2 Base Dependency

5 Local Sub Projects Umd-cm-cfg-dbs – DBs

• Baseline • Developer Reference

Umd-cm-impl – Impl Overrides

Umd-cm-rice – Rice Overlay

Umd-cm-ui – UI Overrides

Umd-cm-web – WAR Deploys

Local Development Environment

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Confluence – Wiki Functional Documentation

Design Specs

Developer Documentation

Development Tools - Confluence

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JIRA – Issue Tracking Functional Issue Tracking

Technical Issue Tracking

Development Tools - JIRA

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Bamboo– Continuous Integration Test Code Compilation

Build Development Artifacts

Test Data Load: UM->KS

Test Deployment

Test UI via Selenium

Development Tools - Bamboo

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“Special” Collaborative Patch Branch First Full Reference Implementation

Critical Issues Will Be Found

Collaboration Between UMD, NWU, and KS

Now running off a local copy of KS CM Waiting for contribution model to be finalized

KS 1.2.2

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Dev Nightly Build – Full Data Load

Public Nightly Build – Reference Impex Load

QA Manual Build – Full Data Load

Duplicate of Production Env 4 KS App Servers Running Parallel

Production Manual Build

One Initial Load

Nightly Update Load

Server Environments

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Tool to Populate KS Implementation with UMD Data

Loads into KS via Web Services DB to DB was deemed to complex

Web Service Contract Stability

Low Volume

Full Load run every night to test iterative changes

Production loads will only update changes

Data Load Testing

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KS 1.1 & 1.2 Partially Implemented Authorization

Adding Standard UI Authorization framework

Finer grained permission checking

Authorization

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Have an effective QA process and try to stick to a release schedule

Improve the product by contributing back patches

Have developers that will maintain the product train on one of the national teams for a month Best way get up to speed quickly

Establish relationships

Learn a lot about effective software development

Running In Production

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Michelle Appel – mappel@umd.edu

Joe Drasin – jdrasin@umd.edu

Chris Mann – cmann@umd.edu

Garey Taylor – gpt@umd.edu

Questions?

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Appendix

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DEMO (MA)

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KS Landing Page (MA)

New color scheme, navigation menu moved

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CM Landing Page (MA)

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Create a Course – Course Information (MA)

Changes in headings, configured & additional fields

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Create a Course – Governance (MA)

Maryland data, constrained values

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Create a Course – Course Logistics (MA)

Customized values

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Create a Course – Course Requisites (MA)

New Rule Types

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Where We’re Headed (MA)