The finish line has been set for months.
The crowd grows anxious as the race date nears.
The race organizers wait with anticipation as the coach assures them everything is moving ahead as planned.
The racers have trained, trained and trained some more. They’ve met hurdles that seemed far too high. But through perseverance and dedication, they are nearing the starting line.
I’m not referring to a UTC Mocs Track and Field event but the analogy works in this case. I’m talking about the pending go live of the UTC website as we start the migration from OUCampus to Drupal 8.5. By the end of August, we will have content live in the Acquia Cloud developed in Drupal.
This is no small feat.
Since late April, the Web team of Chris Gilligan and Mike Flores has been planning their work in a series of ‘sprints’ in order to stay focused and on task to meet the August goal. The term ‘sprint’ is often used in software project management circles as “a short, time-boxed period when a scrum team works to complete a set amount of work.”
The two-week sprints include configuration management (reviewing all the settings to move code from place to place in an organized and efficient manor), content type development, architecture refinement, testing and deployment, and user experience development. Our team is guided by information obtained from Acquia and the larger Drupal community. And, it’s been using tools like Jira and Confluence to capture tasks, meeting notes and to-do lists. For more on sprints in software development, visit the Atlassian Coach.
While the rest of the Web team has focused on the Website Refresh project, Mike and Chris have devoted their time to the development of a content management system that will be modern, clean and ready for the long race.
Stay tuned in coming weeks as we anticipate go live and cheer on the team as they ably sprint to the finish line.