Developer Retreat 2014
Location: NESCent's Grey Conference Room
About participation
- All developers (Ryan, Dan, Daisie, Nathan) will be participating throughout the meeting.
- It is assumed that Todd and Bill will also participate throughout the entire meeting, except for their grant administration meeting on Monday afternoon.
- Martin will participate as time allows, most likely in the morning sessions.
- Other participants are noted in the relevant sections.
Monday, July 28, 2014
9:00am Introductions, Brief review of Development Roadmap and Strategic Plan
9:15am General team issues:
- Extra participants: Hilmar, Jamie, Elizabeth, Jane, (possibly Erin)
- General team communication (Ryan):
- Should we encourage the entire team to use slack?
- Should we allow/invite external developers to use slack?
- Improving communication with staff who "own" features/bugs
- Making it easier for non-developers to edit the website (Elizabeth)
- Improving documentation for developers, both for onboarding employees and to support external developers (Ryan/Daisie/Nathan)
- Social media coverage (Jamie)
- Review policies for announcements and communication with end-users.
- Are there niches we're not hitting? (Google Plus?)
10:30am Break
10:45am Support for curation (Elizabeth)
- Extra participants: Erin, Elizabeth, Jane
- Detailed planning for curation scaling
- Review plans for workflow/communication as work moves to Drexel
- Communication between developers and curators
- Brainstorm to identify common use cases for communication
- What communication mechanism is best for each use case?
- How to best handle urgent items?
- How to notify curators of feature deployment schedule?
- Should curators use slack?
- Requirements gathering for redesign review workflow (Daisie)
12pm Lunch
1pm Submission system issues (Elizabeth)
- Extra participants: Elizabeth, Jamie
- Review the submission system interface -- overall workflow and usability
- This could potentially be a substantial agenda item where we walk through the system screen by screen
3pm Break
3:15pm Support for near-term development projects:
- Preparing for DSpace 4.0 upgrade. Analyze test coverage and determine tests that need to be in place for a smooth upgrade. (Dan)
- (if needed) Further review/planning for ORCID work. (Ryan/Todd)
- Review current prototype for Data Display Widget. Discuss how to structure file viewers. (Nathan)
- Discuss potential UI designs for integrating DataONE search into Dryad search interface. (Nathan)
5:30pm Adjourn
6pm Dinner at Cuban Revolution
7pm Interested people may attend the Durham Bulls game.
Tuesday, July 28, 2014
9am Development planning for next year (Ryan)
- Support for general scalability
- Effects of greater usage/downloads
- Effects of greater submissions
- Effects of greater journal integrations
- Fleshing out details for development activities in year 1 & 2 of the strategic plan.
- Timeline and resources required for all development activities on the strategic plan.
- Re-organizing the Development Roadmap to align with the Strategic Plan
10:30am Break (Todd/Bill have scheduled a call)
10:45 Continue development planning discussions
12pm Lunch
1pm Future of the Dryad software platform:
- Extra participants: Jim Tuttle (Duke), Markus Wust (NCSU)
- Review/brainstorm long-term requirements for a development platform.
- Review available technology platforms.
- Review schedule of platform in strategic plan
2:45pm break
3pm Leftover issues, opportunistic issues, wrapup
5:00pm adjourn
Extra topics
These topics were suggested, and may be addressed as time permits. However, they can be addressed in other meetings.
- Reporting
- Review reports that are currently sent. For each report:
- does the report meet our needs?
- who is responsible for creating it? is there a backup person?
- can we automate the report?
- Review reports that are currently sent. For each report:
- Document management plans -- wiki, Google docs, Dropbox
- Project management tools / methods (Trello, FogBugz, etc.)
- Gather requirements
- Note that a full change may need to wait until we hire an executive director.