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)
  • Staff Onboarding Checklist
  • FogCreek Onboarding
• 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?
• 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.