Robert (Bob) Dalgleish, Systems Analyst
Alan Deschner, Senior Analyst and Project Manager
Information & Communications Technology

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Alan Deschner
Senior Analyst, ICT Applications
Project Manager, CVMS Project

• 2007, 2008 – Various colleges at U of S investigated or partially built CV systems
• Oct’08 – College of Medicine:
– Formed eCV Task Force
– Driven by costs of accreditation reporting
– Wrote project charter for software development
• Fall’08 thru Spring’09
– Requirements gathering and analysis

• Considered commercial systems, other
Universities’ systems, other colleges at U of S
• Deficiencies (3 main ones)
– No support for U of S standard CV format
– Lack of import facilities (e.g., citations)
– Lack of integration with other in-house data sources (student info, research info, etc.)
• Decision: develop in-house

• Feb’10 – proposal to develop in-house
• April’10 – project start-up, analyst and P/A
• July’10 – added another developer
• Aug’10 – added ½ time project manager
• May’11 – alpha testing
• June’11 – beta testing
• End of June’11 – ready to go-live, with a few features not yet implemented

• June 28, 2011 – ready, but college decided not to rush into production:
– Reduced availability in the college over the summer
– Desirability of additional features
• July and Aug’11 – extra development, testing, remediation, and getting ready for go-live
• End of Aug’11 – live for College of Medicine
• End of Sept’11 – live for College of Nursing

• Release 1 (this project)
– Data entry screens
– Load data from EndNote, RefMan
– Produce U of S Comprehensive and Form 1 CV
– Interfaces to some internal systems (deferred)
• Releases 2 & 3 (the future)
– Reporting at department and college levels
– Publishing CV to funding agencies, websites, document management system (workflow)

• Requirements gathering was fairly traditional
• Development used agile, iterative approach
• Use of Jira to manage the backlog, estimates, iteration definitions
• Use of Confluence wiki for documentation
• eCV Task Force acted as the steering committee
• Co-sponsors from Medicine and ICT

• Team was inexperienced in agile methods
• Daily 10-15 minute scrum
– Often took longer, sometimes ½ hour
– Hard to keep on track (inexperience)
• Started with 4-week iterations
– Started to vary, some stretched to 5 weeks, some chopped to 3 weeks
– Got out of step with eCV Task Force meetings

• Representative from Medicine was assigned to the project team.
– Administrative person who deals with CVs
– We wanted her as much as ½ time
– She was only available ½ - 1 day per week
• Many said, “You’re lucky to have that much!”
• Agile says, “You need a SME embedded in the project team, full time if possible!”

• A working group was put together from the colleges and various departments
– Review and test the application deployed in the previous iteration
– Identify new or changed functionality
– Help with details of the requirements
– Make recommendations to the eCV Task Force
• Met every second week, and did some additional testing between meetings

• In iteration 6, we started 2-week iterations with defined reviews, releases to the test environment.
Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday am: deploy N-1 pm: plan N
Begin work on iteration N
Testers review iteration N-1
Last day to develop iteration N am: deploy N pm: plan N+1
Testers review iteration N

Bob Dalgleish
Systems Analyst, ICT Applications
Lead Analyst, CVMS Project

Faculty
CV
Administrative Staff
CV
Granting Agencies
Promotions and
Tenure Committee
Activity
Report

Research Services
Faculty
CVMS
Grad Studies
Citation
Management
Software
Administrative Staff
Contact Database
Human Resources
Course Information

• RedHat Linux, JBoss EAP 5
CVMS
Application
Java 6 Virtual Machine
And many more
Java 6 Virtual Machine
Java 6 Virtual Machine
Java 6 Virtual Machine
RedHat Enterprise Linux
Virtual Machine Container

• Deployment: Workstations and Servers
Developer
Workstation
Subversion
Repository
Jira Issue
Repository
Jenkins
Continuous
Integration
TestDT Test Prod

• Eclipse (JBoss Developer Studio)
• Subclipse (Subversion connector)
• TestNG – test suite runner
• Selenium – UI test suite developer & runner
• Clover – test coverage reporter
– Goal was 70% coverage, stabilized at 63%
• Jira – Issue reporting tool, release management, communications
• Confluence (wiki) – requirements & design capture

• Information Architecture:
– Information doesn’t mean the same thing to two different people, departments or colleges
• Standards, so many of them, so little time
• Publishing: iText vs DocBook,
• Hibernate as object repository
• Categorization, for publishing and reports
• Work flows

• Many sources for data models and metadata
– CASRAI, Dublin Core, HR-XML.org, CommonCV.net
– Decided to normalize data and minimize structure clashes
• Working group process
– Discuss data elements, how they would be used, collected, verified
– Built prototypes, tested by working group members
– Repeat
• Focused on requirements of university CV
– Publishing requirements
– Review process

• Implements persistence (Java Persistence
Architecture)
– Push data to repository if it has been changed
– Coordinate network of linked objects
– Minimizes SQL to be written
• Inversion of Control
– LazyInitializationException - means you aren’t where you think you are
– While Hibernate handles much of it …

• Each line item has a section selector

• Some items have many categories, some have only one available.

• The section is where the item appears in our standard CV …

• Each item goes through a sequence, Entered
(Not Approved), Requires Attention, Approved

citations.xml
citations.txt
JAXB
Parser
EndNote
XML
Import
RefMan
Import
Import
Feedback
CVMS

Phase I is complete for two colleges, what now?
• Next biggest need is reporting
• Complete some of the deferred features
• Integrate with other systems
• Roll out to the rest of campus
This looks like an on-going program.

• Reporting for departments and colleges
– Faculty activity reports
– Research reports
– Reports for accreditation
• User-defined query, extract, reporting facility
– Facilitate external analysis

Reporting
Data
Audiences
Faculty & Committees
Accreditation Panels
…

Reporting
Audiences
Faculty & Committees
Accreditation Panels
…
Data
Data Quality
Management
Governance
Processes
People

Data Quality Management
- Incorrect data
- Missing data
- Redundant or duplicated data
Report Parameters
- Periods
- Categories
- Populations
Report Format
- Raw Excel file
- Formatted Word or HTML file
- Dashboard

• Publish CV to document management system
– Enable workflows for college reviews related to tenure and promotion
• Publish to personal website
• Publish to commonCV.net
• Additional citation formats (only NLM now)
• Additional CV formats
– Other funding agencies

• Pull data from other U of S systems
– Student info, HR, research admin, grad studies
• Pull data from external systems
– e.g., PubMed, Scopus
• Bulk load of legacy data using cut-and-paste and data parsing
• Additional data fields to support other disciplines (e.g., humanities, fine arts)

• Improve the change management processes:
– Changes identified by the working group need approval from eCV Task Force, but there was not enough time to answer the question,
“How much will it cost?”
– Scope creep is insidious! Beware!
– Help users understand that adding a new feature means dropping something else.

• Include an expert agile practitioner when an organizational goal is to change software development methods to agile.
• Shorter iterations are better.
• The more user involvement, the better.
And constant involvement is best.
• Overall, agile is better than the alternatives!

• Don’t expect users to know what they want until they see what they don’t want!
• The great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from!

Contact us:
Alan.Deschner@usask.ca
Bob.Dalgleish@usask.ca
http://www.usask.ca/its/services/cv_management_system/

Project Team
• Bob Dalgleish
• Boris Tchoursine
• Aileen Garcia
• Carla Zorn (Medicine)
• Alan Deschner (PM)
• Kirby McInnis (AIS Manager) eCV Task Force & Work Group
• Dr Roger Pierson (co-chair)
• Dr Vivian Ramsden (co-chair)
• Dr Ron Doucette
• Dr Roger Keith
• Dr Angela Busch (PT)
• Dr Phil Woods (Nursing)
• John Costa
• Special guests