Notes for sprint ‘Vladimir Karpets’ (29 February to 11 March)

Gareth Saunders
Friday 25 March 2016
Vladimir Karpets
Vladimir Karpets

The work in this sprint took place from Monday 29 February to Friday 11 March 2016.

We had reached sprint K, so this two weeks’ sprint was named after Russian cyclist Vladimir Karpets. Born in Leningrad in September 1980 Karpets is most notable for winning the white jersey for the best young rider in the 2004 Tour de France, and for his victories in the overall classifications of the Volta a Catalunya and the Tour de Suisse, both in 2007. He is also a two-time Olympian.

Project DC1001 External website redevelopments

What we did (sprint #16)

  1. Following direction from the digital communications portfolio board, we reworked the next three sprints to accommodate creating a prototype standard School website.
  2. Ran a usability testing session with visiting day guests to benchmark experience of using the current site compared with our prototype.
  3. Wrote code standards guide for writing documentation using Markdown.
  4. Continued to work with SER Curriculum View project managers regarding shared data.
  5. T4 v8 was installed on development and test servers.

Next sprint (#17)

  1. Audit school websites for content and patterns.
  2. Create a survey to help evaluate the effectiveness of current School websites.
  3. Write code standards guides for HTML and XML.

Project DC1002 Content delivery network

The objective of this project is to reduce University website and web application load times around the world, and enable all developers to work with reusable assets (CSS, JavaScript, and supporting media) from an optimised, central location.

For the next three months we will be gathering statistics to evaluate the current total bandwidth used to deliver our current assets.

Project DC1003 WordPress multisite

This project will see the current central installation of WordPress multisite moved to a third-party hosting provider, other standalone WordPress sites migrated into it, and a curated list of themes and plugins created and maintained.

We are currently in the DSDM Atern foundations phase of the project, which involves defining how the project will be managed, outlining the system architecture to be deployed, gathering user requirements, and writing a full business case.

Business as usual

What we did

  1. We welcomed Maria to the team.
  2. Wrote one talk proposal for IWMW 2016.
  3. Editorial calendar updates for March to about, UG section, PG research, and college counsellors’ conference.
  4. Launched the Virginia Woolf long-form story.

Next sprint

  1. Attend Scottish Web Folk meeting in Edinburgh on Friday 18 March.
  2. Write further IWMW talk proposals.
  3. Write DSDM Agile conference talk proposal.
  4. Upgrade WordPress multisite.

 

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