Pardon the late post, this is the fifth biweekly update from the Web Programming work-group and will take us to the holiday break. The Application Development group has moved to a cyclical task and project planning work-flow in order to better prioritize our work. We acknowledge that requests will always come to us in a variety of ways and do not wish to burden members of the Middlebury community with overly formalized request processes. At the same time we also need to acknowledge that institutional and departmental priorities often shift over time and therefore we must have a work planning process that allows for flexibility that addresses the needs of the community, and maintains a healthy work environment for our staff.

All requests to the Web Aplication Development work-group will be placed into our request/task/project pool. At the beginning of each biweekly work cycle we will evaluate the contents of this pool and tackle a set of work that can be accomplished at our current staffing level. While we will generally try to fit requests into our work cycles in a timely manner, we will not promise what work cycle a request will be placed in. Our task/project pool is not a first-in-first-out system (a queue) nor is it a last-in-first-out system (a stack), the pool is a mixed collection of items that will be reevaluated each work cycle based on how the projects match against institutional, departmental, and work-group priorities.

For major projects and/or those with firm deadlines, specifications may be required, and evaluation/approval will be required. LIS will be working with others on campus to define this approval process.

General Focus

The Web Application Development work-group is currently focused on the Web Redo project — both finishing up the MIIS site and developing the Midd site.

Tasks/Projects planned for the current cycle (December 2 – December 22, extended due to holidays)

Tasks/Projects planned for and completed in the previous cycle (November 10 – December 1, extended due to holidays)

Please note that the items listed here represent a range of time commitments; some took 10 minutes to complete, others took 3 days.

Tasks/Projects NOT planned for and completed in the previous cycle (November 10 – December 1, extended due to holidays)

Please note that the items listed here represent a range of time commitments; some took 10 minutes to complete, others took 3 days.

Tasks/Projects planned, but not completed in the previous cycle

The production server for Lynx was created after this cycle. Tasks related to the Course Catalog were postponed to address other tasks.

Task/Project Pool