We have created, and continue to explore, an open system whereby developers from all over the University can write and contribute code adding new functionality to the software that runs the University website benefiting the whole University. With our third EdWeb code sprint completed the process now feels properly established. This is part of a very successful collaboration between two teams within Information Services: Applications and Website and Communications.

On the day

A code sprint is a focused, targeted block of development time that brings together developers for a day to work on issues, bugs and new functionality for our Content Management System EdWeb. The ingredients for a successful code sprint are also the key foundation elements that allowed us to build our collaborative development framework.

Hard at work in the main room for the code sprint

14 developers came together to investigate, develop, test and complete a number of EdWeb development tasks. Some tasks are aimed at sprint beginners where learning the process is as important as the tasks they are working on. These included work to change help text that needed tweaked or rewritten where we have identified users having difficulty. We are always working to make our CMS as easy as possible to use. While this may sound simple it’s actually some peoples first introduction to an incredibly complex system and it takes time and much concentration to learn the incredibly complex process to make these changes. We have a number of very experienced developers on hand to demonstrate the process and help, support and advise over the course of the day. We started work on a number of development issues which can be completed outside of the code sprint. We also completed 5 tasks and 1 bug fix which were committed back to the codebase at the end of the day to much applause and cheers!

The location was in our meeting space in Argyle House. Our team moved here in November 2016 and have never looked back. It’s a great space with open plan office space upstairs and 20 meeting room of varying sizes on the ground floor. We used two rooms that with a connecting wall that can be opened up to allow a contained space for small group discussions and store the copious amounts of coffee needed.

See how far we’ve come from our first sprint – Our first code sprint in July 2016

Break out room at the code sprint

Join our Technical Peer Group

The code sprint is a great day that we all learn from so if you are interested in coming along we are always looking for new developers and themers familiar with the Drupal 7 framework with at least beginner level Drupal dev experience.

Find out about our Technical Peer Group and join the mailing list to hear about our events, meetings and code sprints:
University Website Technical Peer Group

Learning more about Drupal 7

As members of staff we have full access to Lynda.com and there are many courses available on Drupal 7.

Search for Drupal 7 courses on Lynda.com

Laying the foundations for our framework

The code sprints have laid the foundations for our framework and allowed our technical team in Website and Communications to pick up an important piece of work – adding social media sharing functionality to EdWeb.

This is the start of building a new and innovative framework tapping into the rich vein of expertise we have at the University. Previously this expertise has only been utilised at a local level, but we have now found a way of using this resource to benefit everyone. This is obviously a highly efficient way of working saving both time and money. It is just one part of the developer community that is being built at the University.

More on our collaborative development framework

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