Notes for sprint ‘Greg LeMond’ (14 to 25 March 2016)
The work in this sprint took place from Monday 14 to Friday 25 March 2016.
Sprint L saw us adopting ole Greg LeMond for our sprint name. Gregory James LeMond (born 26 June 1961) is an American former professional road racing cyclist who won the Road Race World Championship twice (1983 and 1989) and the Tour de France three times (1986, 1989 and 1990). LeMond became the first non-European professional cyclist to win the Tour de France, and he remains the only official winner from the United States. He is, incidentally, a big anti-doping advocate.
This has been a very productive sprint with a lot of energy, and great collaboration between members of the content and development teams. The day and a half planning workshop held during sprint #16 (Vladimir Karpets) proved to be very effective, as did moving the detailed sprint planning session to Monday morning, from Friday afternoon.
Project DC1001 External website redevelopments
What we did (sprint #17)
- All but one school sites were audited for content and patterns. (Delay was caused by illness.)
- A survey was created for existing school websites to baseline existing user experience, understanding who is using School websites and what tasks they are undertaking.
- Code (and markup) style and standards guide for HTML is now in a first draft. (XML guide has not been begun.)
- Continued to liaise with SER Curriculum View project managers regarding shared data.
- The same Google Analytics code that is on the main University website has now been added to the websites of the Schools of Computer Science, Film Studies, History, Medicine, Philosophy, Physics and Astronomy, and Social Anthropology. This will allow us to track visitors, trends, etc.
- The content team has started to create a prototype subject page in T4, based on the prototype website. Once this page has been completed, it will be the focus of feedback from DCPB, Schools and usability testing.
Next sprint (#18 David Millar)
- Complete stakeholder engagement plan for PGT 2016 entry pages.
- Begin benefits realisation plan.
- Decide which patterns and pages should be compulsory for prototype School website.
- Create compulsory patterns in the digital pattern library.
- Begin launch of PGT 2016 entry pages.
- Write HTML code standards.
- Write XML code standards.
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.
From March to May 2016, 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 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
- Attended Scottish Web Folk meeting in Edinburgh on Friday 18 March.
- Wrote proposals for a talk and workshop at IWMW 2016 conference.
- Wrote talk proposal for the Agile Business Conference in London, October 2016.
- Upgraded WordPress multisite to v4.4.2.
Next sprint (#18)
- Digital advisory board presentations.
- Editorial calendar for April.
- Ensure that all team members write at least one blog post.