What no database ?

At Sussex University the data in Skillclouds comes from our Oracle database.

We cannot really expect everyone else to have the same database, tables or data. The data we display in Skillclouds at Sussex is personal and sensitive.

For this reason the Skillclouds open source version is not really a stand-alone system. It is a template for a webpage within an already existing (probably) internal and password protected web site. It's also not platform specific to a Framework, CMS or ILE like Moodle.

Skillclouds does provide you with data structure diagrams, UML, interactive Javascript, PHP classes, adaptable CSS and front end XHTML web pages to add the data you want to. SkillClouds also provides you with some dummy data, so when you unzip SkillClouds it all just works out the box as if you were a logged in as student at Sussex! Alongside the the code documentation, code layout and variable naming this 'out of the box' approach got the best response from our testing with developers.

The initial code we tested with some developers included PHP's PDO which allows you to connect many a database, and have a layer of abstraction.

Sounds great ? Well almost.

When testing the open source version of the Skillclouds code with developers and we came across some issues with this.

The first problem came when a developer we were testing with had a database PDO didn't support. Just our luck we thought.

The second set of problems came when we found some institutions didn't have the information Skillclouds was asking for in any database! They then had to edit more code than if the PDO layer had not been there.

Another developer described how they write queries for fetching things from their institutions database every day, and so knows how to do this like the back of their hand. Skillclouds having this layer of PDO was more of an obstacle then an advantage to them. They found it quicker to plug in their own code, then plug in the PDO layer.

It is a common problem for open source code that isn't platform dependent.

The outcome is we left the open source Skillclouds code as open as possible for the moment. The PDO layer might come back in the next stage, but for the moment the overwhelming developer feedback was to leave it out.

We can recommend the information you should provide in your own Skillclouds installation, but we are not going to tie you to it.

We are interested to hear from other projects having similar issues, other developers opinions on this and we are still looking for developers to test the next stage of development with. Just press the Contact us link above and say hello.

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!