[schooltool-dev] foo > manage or manage > foo ?

[David Welsh]

Based on the experience of New Hampshire and CanDo with UI design, I would
suggest the following:

1) Working on the prototype of what the UI should look like, and mocking it
up in html, is a very good use of time from now until the sprint.  Without
an agreed-upon prototype, which includes the right tabs, menu items and
navigation, it makes no sense to begin coding.

2) It does make sense to keep in mind a doable scope of work as we improve
the SchoolTool UI.  Working on CanDo, for example, we first included some
SchoolTool changes, but then abandoned that reasoning that it was beyond our
scope.  Then we decided not to make any changes to the admin interface, and
to focus only on the teacher and student interfaces.  This turned out to be
a manageable scope of work.

3) Even with good mock-ups and a reasonable scope of work, it will be
impossible to finish UI changes during the sprint.  There are just too many
things to test and change.  What we can hope to do is to get a start on the
coding, and then to make it easier for us all to work out all the wrinkles
and ramifications over time.  It took probably FOUR WEEKS of work to get the
CanDo UI totally functioning.  But the bulk of the conceptual work was done
by the sprint, and we did get started on the coding.

I'll read the log from today's meeting and see if I have anything else to
add.

--David Welsh

On Sun, Feb 24, 2008 at 3:34 PM, Tom Hoffman <tom.hoffman at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sun, Feb 24, 2008 at 1:49 PM, Ignas Mikalajunas
> <ignas.mikalajunas at gmail.com> wrote:
> > >  Well... the idea is to arrive at the sprint knowing what we're going
> >  >  to implement, so I'd rather talk about it now.  What's your
> thinking,
> >  >  Paul?
> >  >
> >  >  --Tom
> >
> >  Oh, news to me. I kind of thought that we were not going to implement
> >  full UI in sprint, and only discuss it, so Alan (from what I can
> >  recall he wanted to do redo schooltool UI, as I didn't really want to
> >  do that) would know where to go when he will do the UI work by
> >  himself.
>
> Apparently I need to do a better job of sending Ignas emails after
> talking to Alan and Jeff here.  Regardless, we still have plenty of
> time to figure this out.
>
> What I don't want to do is spend time at the sprint talking about UI.
> We've done that at what, three other sprints, without much to show for
> it.  I want to be writing code.
>
> >  Is it really feasible to decide upon the UI using email, and then
> >  implement it fully during a quite busy week without some serious
> >  consequences like a code a quality hit and work that will have to be
> >  performed after the sprint? Especially keeping in mind CanDo
> >  integration and schooltool instance that is used by Lyceum.
>
> Whatever we work on, it should be a manageable and achievable within
> the context of a sprint.  Perhaps we just need to define the scope of
> the UI changes so that they are feasible given the time and people
> we'll have on hand.  One reason to do UI here is that we'll have
> interns available who should be able to wrangle page templates.
>
> Maybe if we limit the scope of our ambition to rearranging the
> navigation (add tabs, ditch breadcrumbs, ditch navigation menu)
> without doing anything too complicated to the way each component works
> (coming up with a system to register admin views) that would be more
> reasonable.  Just get the basic tabbed paradigm into the trunk, even
> if it isn't as completely implemented as we can imagine.
>
> Anyhow, there's plenty of time to discuss it.
>
> --Tom
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