Progressing with TODB deployments

The Engineering department Teaching Office Database (TODB) has been deployed in the past month to the Judge Business School (JBS). This was a natural first deployment since JBS and Engineering share lecturers and students from each department tend to take some courses in the other. This was also a test case for the suitability of the TODB to a different environment than the one in which it was created (Engineering).

Initial feedback from JBS is very positive. The local team has asked for several minor modifications, which were put in place by Matthew Jones who also deployed the system to JBS. Apart from those the TODB was taken as is and already proves useful to JBS.

Encouraged by a first successful deployment we now plan to deploy in other participating departments. First up will be the department of English. They are much smaller than engineering and consequently staff do not belong to specific divisions within the department and can teach almost any course. They also allow lecture courses to belong to more than one degree path. These are new challenges for the TODB and will serve to further test its suitability to various environments. We expect feedback by the end of April 2009.

Further deployments are planned in the departments of Chemistry and Divinity in May 2009. The latter is of a particular interest because they have no programmers locally and will not be able to modify the system they get in the future. They are therefore more likely to want "future proofing" and this may lead to new requirements.

The hope is that the feedback collected by June 2009 will be sufficient for us to generalize the TODB schema and build an access API to the database that will serve future developments well.

The examination entries module, to be developed by the Physis department, will benefit from ground-work laid down by the deployments of the TODB. The examination entries schema and database API will be built in accordance with those of the generalized TODB and will therefore become a first test case for it. In order to achieve this it is important to have both systems in the same place, and therefore it is only natural to deploy the TODB in Physics around June 2009. Feedback from Physics, which is a large departments with many inter-departmental courses, will inform the process of generalizing the TODB even further and at the same time give us the basis on which to develop the examination entries module.

Our expectation is to have a proper design for both modules by July 2009 and move into development immediately after this milestone.