Skillclouds developer happiness

On most of the projects I work on we spend a great deal of time looking at user experience and making the end user enjoy a site. Sometimes an equal amount of time is put into the back-end design with an enjoyable cms interface. Very rarely is the developer who has to set up the project considered in any user testing.

When programming code for the open source community it is a completely different approach. Whether contributing a plugin to wordpress or a library to jquery you're putting the code out there to your fellow developers for peer review, and they become your primary stakeholders/target audience.

After showing out SkillClouds code to a number of developers at the recent JISC dev8d developer happiness days we took the opportunity to extend our user centred design approach to the users who have to install, configure and implement SkillClouds in other Universities.

We started off asking developers about the SkillClouds documentation/readme file - the structure, the style of writing, how much detail they like and generally how ours could be better. Lots of very obvious things came up you might not think of when your head is so far into the code - just the same as during front end user testing.

At the next stage we started looking at code, and got some very nice comments from all the testers about the structure, variable names and general semantic nature of the code.

There were some conflicting views on data structure, with the general view being that to integrate SkillClouds into another University's systems it would take a developer, as compared to a systems administrator. Automated database installation was not seen as a good idea, but an abstract data layer was seen as helpful. There were also conflicting views on complexity vs object oriented abstraction, and how these might increase project set-up time.

Our approach of providing 'dummy data' so as SkillClouds runs straight out the box was given a thumbs up with, apart from a permissions problem, all users having a working demo almost straight after unzipping.

We are now refining the SkillClouds code based on the developer feedback - a big thanks to all involved!

SkillClouds at UCISA 2009

Members of IT Services took a poster from the SkillClouds team up to Liverpool for the UCISA 2009 conference poster session:

http://www.ucisa.ac.uk/events/2009/conference/posters.aspx

Our poster and abstract are available for view on the publications site:
http://www.sussex.ac.uk/skillclouds/publications.php?publication=ucisa2009

SkillClouds forming over Sussex (and beyond)

A key indicator of the success of JISC projects (from JISC’s perspective) seems to be the extent to which the outputs are adopted, by both the home institution and external organisations. In terms of the former, we can claim some success, as Sussex - and specifically, its Teaching and Learning Committee - has taken the view that SkillClouds can help support some of the University’s strategic priorities.

The University is particularly interested in using SkillClouds to support student personal development and the role academic advising (personal tutoring). For the remainder of the academic year we will be meeting all departments at Sussex to explore how they can use to tool in their differing contexts. We have secured additional funding to carry out further development and integration of the SkillClouds.

In terms of the possibility of SkillClouds forming over other parts of the country, we have had some interest from other universities and are currently liaising with them. Stuart (the project’s technical developer) has created the first version of an open source version of SkillCloud pages. People can add their in-house style sheet and see exactly what the SkillClouds pages would look like within their institution.

Feedback on this version has so far been positive and has been described by one member of the Emerge team as ‘beautiful code’. Now, as a non-developer, I’m not entirely sure what this means, but I imagine there can be no higher praise from one of your peers.

Finally we are in discussion people working at a university in Australia who think SkillClouds could be useful to their institution.

You can read more about the open source version at the SkillClouds blog http://skillclouds.blogspot.com/2009/02/skillclouds-open-source-its-alive.html