Discuss their mobile app development support model
group
What is their model for supporting the mobile app development?
doing it since 2011, Luke W on twitter, they have Ohio state app since they started.
Couple of employee developers, marketing people and graphic designers started it. met once a month and developed. Got to where we are now. Someone asked why they don't have a mobile app and got funding.
2 ios developers, 1 android developer, 1.5 person doing server side part.
Alumni association is good at raising money, they recently asked them to add functionality and they will be hiring people to do development
They have a regimented process to add functionality to the app, 3 day design workshop
Everybody identified the need, but nobody would give the money. Got various funding until they had a product to show.
It is hard because we want it to be multi-platform. i-phone, i-pad, i-watch, android. Keeping them current is one thing, doing it well and professionally is another game. iOS Siri shortcuts just came out. We don't know if they will be big or not. They try to develop consumer ready products. Took them a while to secure long term funding, but now they have it.
They always have students helping them, but if we want to see a university -wide impact, we have to have at least one person responsible. Political staff- the students ignore it. They have had cases where the provost called because the app crashed.
To have the level of polish and quality, you want somebody other than students responsible.
With any new functionality that comes up, the first answer is - put it in the app
Students contributed from the beginning
if we keep the app scope narrow, students can maintain it
they didn't want to buy something as they wanted to have control over the user experience
This is what Apple does in their Cupertino design lab, so they modeled it the same
goal - getting people away from their offices
day 1 - pain points, turn them into stories, share with students
day 2 - sketch review, it is a learning process as they are not the domain experts,
day 3 - high fidelity mock-up
sketchapp.com (sketch.cloud)
After that they send a proposal
most of it is read only, some forms to submit instructor evaluation, and few others, but mostly read only
everything is in a different place, and students are expected to know where these things are, but they don't. It is a one place to have all info.
68K students enrolled
about 75K unique users a month as they have visitors using the app as well, the non-identifying info
Advising ino - who their advisors are, contact info, and notes for the student
they have an API layer between the app and any service. The amount of traffic will crush any system, including the SIS. Network traffic has been a bottleneck, and others. API layer is cleaning up the data, caching the data, if they switch a system, it is transparent to the user.
In Apple workshops executives are not invites, students and end-users are the ones giving requirements.
Culture change needs to happen. Reg doesn't own the data, the university does.
Slogan - go where the students are
can send emergency push notifications
Have class schedules, grades, LMS grades
Send notifications when students have a hold on their account.
How did students stay in the development of the product? They have 3 students working now for them.
Students are required to sign up for a year minimum. They have guiding principles that they share with everyone.
Steven - described how he sees it going -
Response - it is going to be hard,
they use Fabric for crash monitoring, get a lot of stats when the app crashes.
we will miss these things when we have people not handling the technical debt.
they also monitor all end-points in splunk, get notifications if any API is slow or fail. Get notification if anything is returned in more than 3 seconds.
They don't have 24 hrs monitoring, but they are on call.
Developers push code to prod on the service side
use Jenkins and is all automated
Apple said they are testing too much - about 20%
run 4 instances of the API layer, 3 instances of the caching layer, 3 instances of the cache DB
main app for pushing notifications to students, have a way for departments to submit these
rules for push notifications are strong, and they do not bend around them.
have push notification framework in AWS.
if a student goes on probation, an ID is written in a table, and they go find it.
Materials from Ohio state
Materials sent by Benjamin Hancock after the meeting
Btw one thing I didn’t mention is with our current team we do 2-3 big features a year, and do about 20-30 quality of life / design/ technical debt improvements per year. During July/August/December, we try as much as possible to do strictly refactoring.
Obviously we didn’t start here! Lots of pain and learning and mistakes along the way…. But once people realized the value, we were able to press for time, resources, etc. to do things better.
