Scotland JS 2015 – Day 1

ScotlandJS2

Recently I attended the Scotland JS conference, which I have to say was really inspirational. A big thank you to the organisers for making this happen! The conference was an amazing mixture of the practical and thought-provoking. I came away with a lot of ideas on improving my own work.

For those who weren’t able to attend I’ll be posting my notes from the talks. You can also find out more about these from the conference website (linked above) and the Scotland JS Twitter feed.

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SITS User Conference 2014

This past summer, representatives from the SSP team attended the annual SITS user conference. (Yes, it has taken this long for us to type up our notes.)

Ruth McCallum and Peter Pratt represented the team in giving a presentation called “Taking e:Vision to a new frontier”. This demonstrated some of the recent work we have done using Bootstrap and other custom CSS/JS. Following the presentation we have been in contact with several other universities who are interested in sharing techniques with us, and hope to keep in contact with them. We were also recognised for our achievements by winning the Tribal University of the Year award for 2014!

University of the Year award
Team manager Defeng Ma proudly displays our University of the Year award

Overall, the conference focused on some of the new functionality and improvements which we will be seeing in SITS 8.7.1 and 8.8.0. Below are some highlights from the sessions that we attended.

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Testing Times – Python unittest and Selenium

In the SSP we have been putting together a small suite of performance tests to use as before/after checks in the SITS upgrade. In the SSP we have a mixture of IS and non-IS staff, so it was important to come up with a procedure which was:

  1. Easily maintainable
  2. Accessible to team members who don’t come from a programming background

Selenium was a natural choice, since it is already being used elsewhere in the department, and it has a handy interface which lets you record tests easily.

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Overlapping projects: two sides of the same coin

Over the past few months in IS SSP we have been working on two major SITS projects: UG Paperless and Direct Paperless Admissions. Both projects have come out of the push towards moving away from paper applications and doing all of our admissions processing online. The UG Admissions project was first implemented last year and is now in its second iteration. Direct Admissions will be released for the first time this fall. Continue reading “Overlapping projects: two sides of the same coin”