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Building Sakaigers: Students as QA Teams
- 1. Open Apereo 2016 100% Open for Education Building Sakaigers: Students as QA Teams Dede Hourican, Marist College
- 2. Building Sakaigers Students as QA Teams
- 3. Why Students? • Education • Visa • Cost • Community • Alumni
- 4. Our Students: International Graduate and Undergraduate Students Computer Science and Math (Full Year) Undergrads (AY) 7+
- 5. Onboarding Students Interview Sakai 12 QA Hub Best Practice Guides (Local) Team Leads
- 9. Sandbox Site Office Procedures iTeam Student Training
- 11. Tools Students Sakai iLearn – Web Services Student Site Student training checklists Local Upgrade testing tracking https://trello.com/b/sDQm5Iik/ilearn-114-sanity-testing
- 13. Ideas Students Cross Train other IT Students Usability Automated testing Trello: https://trello.com/b/zL1yYlwa/sakai11-qa-testing-marist
- 15. “As an organization, you guys provide us with the soft and technical skills to be successful in the workplace. I am doing testing now as a Systems and Integration/Test Engineer and the skills I learned have helped me adapt very quickly to the challenging environment of Lockheed Martin.” John H. Test Engineer LM IS&GS Defense & Intelligence Solutions
- 16. “Just heard back from Thomson Reuters and I got the job! It looks like I get to go to England for 1-2 weeks for training as well. I can easily say that it was because of my experience with training, iTeam projects, and iLearn that I even had the chance of getting this job so I cannot thank you guys enough.” Cody S.
- 19. Attribution: (CC BY 3.0 US) https://thenounproject.com/search/?q=knowledge+transfer&i=36667Share Image: By TrentoFuckingCity, IT https://thenounproject.com/search/?q=group%20meeting&i=140091 Networking By Daouna Jeong, US
Editor's Notes
- Thank you… and welcome to Building Sakaigers: Student as QA Teams My name is Dede Hourican and I am the Sr. Support Specialist with Marist College.
- At any institution, QA testing resources are always in short supply. Using student staff, the Information Technology at Marist College builds quality assurance testing teams for Sakai and beyond. In the open source community, software quality assurance testing is always needed, yet few institutions have the resources to devote to this important task. In this session we will show how student staff teams are used to perform testing, contribute to an successful software implementation for the institution and be a sustainable and cost effective model for the open source community.
- Why use students? First we are an educational institution. One of our goals is to create 21st century global leaders. The information technology department offers world experience and skills that translate to real world jobs. Due to VISA restrictions - international graduate students cannot work off campus. This limitation forces skilled computer science majors to work in the cafeteria, or other the places where they cannot hone their skills. Well, … they cost less than permanent full-time staff. They may stay in the open source community Finally, the additional experience they gain in our department connects them to the institution not only as students, but as alumni as well. For example, students who graduated six years ago – stopped by … just to say hi, show off their alma-mater
- Who are our students? We usually have any where between 5 to 7 students focused on QA throughout the year. Many are International graduate students taking their in school of computer science and math. The length of stay for a graduate Graduate student are at the college for about 18 months, - In recent years, we have increased our numbers of undergrad students in order to have an overlap of students during the course of the year. This assists with cross training as well as keeping the departmental knowledge as long as possible. Benefits: Whereas undergrads leave in the summer - Graduate students stay all summer @40 hours a week This is also helpful as we do our upgrades over the Summer and its when we need the most help with local testing.) Some may already have been employed in the “real world” ********* And as international students - we get to share their culture and they ours
- We begin the process at the interview, giving special attention to students who already have real world work experience or an interest in QA and customer support. This benefits us locally as basic skill sets may have already been taught - such as how to appropriately answer the phone or convey messages, basic office skills. Then we look for personality and drive. We hire people for their personality as most of the skills they need can be taught. Once hired, we begin the onboarding process that includes training on our institutions version of Sakai - (which we call iLearn) , access to the ticketing system, trello board, slack and sign-up for the Sakai Community. Team leads then partner with the new students to walk them through the proper use of these tools. The Sakai 12 QA hub has smoothed out some of the confusion we found with earlier versions. (I’ll speak more on this later) Team leads then partner with the new students to walk them through the proper use of these tools.
- Challenges: - Cultural (map) Many of our graduate students are from India. When I visited there, I found that everything took longer and happened later than I expected – approximately two hours longer. Recognizing that someone comes from a less punctual culture…. And we hire students here, we make a large effort to recognize those challenges and address them. Solution: 1) Scheduling (Time) This include the use of time clock. Our tool is open source and allows for the many student we have in Information technology. There are free ones available, but I have not located one that can handle more than 5 students. Our students are offered the option to create their own schedules. This allows for buy in and accountability of their schedules
- Challenges you may encounter: Location: (Lab) Like many institutions, we have physical space limitation. Our office has training lab that can house 16 participants. However, if a faculty training is in session, what can we do to mitigate the issue? Solutions: We use loaner laptops or ask students to bring their own and disperse them throughout the labs and common areas of the building or campus. We also have been allowed space with the Help Desk students in their area as well. Another benefit is this also allows for unextected cros-training
- Challenges you may encounter: Communication: We have been using slack as our office communication device. We also use this tool for phone messages, late notifications, lunch, any office questions and of course questions regarding QA. We use the iLearn messages tool for late notifications and for scheduled time off. This helps so we track the absences.
- To Begin: Training on the local instance of Sakai. This includes the creation of sandbox sites where the students are the instructors and can follow along with the Best practice guides for the institution. The Sakai – The Student site contains all the written documentation that pertains to the process and procedures of the office. This includes the Student Manual, office expectations, information about the Timeclock, payroll and specific /unique test cases from our last upgrade. Track the training progress using trello boards with checkboxes of completion. This shows the date and time the student felt fully comfortable with the process and the tools. The department also trains the faculty on the latest version of Sakai. Students are often "trainees in attendance” - standing by to assist the faculty but they also receive the same training as the faculty as well. iTeam - Our students also participate in "just in time" faculty training. On a weekly basis they go out to the faculty buildings offering face to face assistance and training. These interactions are about 15 minutes. It includes a printed reminder of upcoming faculty training sessions, a survey and a candy bar. These are recorded in the ticketing system for review.
- Documentation: There are two types of documentation . The first is the office process, procedure documentation and basic how-to documentation that the students must read and understand. The second is training documentation. The Students create and update the documentation during training of the next new student. -The team lead will walk a new student through the task using existing documentation. If the new student is unable to complete the task using the existing documentation then the NEW student writes the steps while the leader walks them through the steps. effectively uses the training time. The office has limited staff and having the students peer train with and create the documentation For example: In the AT student trello board “How to use this site” https://trello.com/c/XA9kiIvx/26-how-to-use-this-board-instructions-for-trello
- Trello is used for marist local upgrade test tracking (https://trello.com/b/sDQm5Iik/ilearn-114-sanity-testing ) and as a communication tool between support and system testing /development. In the past we moved the cards between the developers board and the support board. (DISPLAY THE Sakai11 QA testing @Marist) Allows for assignment of an issue for testing Allows everyone to see the status Labels show what type of testing needs review. Documentation: See We participate in the Sakai Docs Working Group. In the past - Students are also helpful in this venue as well. They are also instrumental in creating our Sakai internal support documentation – such as help guides and videos Trello helps us figure out which documents need updating or creating , Students also cross train other IT students and create support documents!
- The Sakai 11 QA hub has been instrumental in onboarding our new students. https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/QA/Sakai+12+QA+Hub Testing: Using the existing community test cases, we began by just following the existing scripts. These were out of date and the discrepancy of what was an expected outcome for the tools and what was displayed became "teachable moments“ for test case creation, for understanding pass/fail and what can be done about it and bug tracking and reporting. This year, the Sakai QA committee was able to streamline testing by updating the framework used for testing and lead weekly test fests and calls in which the students were encouraged to participate. For example, a student created a jira that needed clarity from our team. Because the student was actually on the call, they could answer the question immediately and feel fully a part of the process. This process created ownership and accountability where the student is a part of the Sakai community. Challenge here was letting him know it was OK to participate and ask questions. (again - teachable moments) Again – communication is key here. We have a slack team for our students , with a channel just for testing. All questions, Ideas and random thoughts are shared there Confluence: Testing Process and procedures https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/QA/Sakai+12+QA+Hub Jira: bug and fix tracking
- All of these items are inclusive. The students begin to feel a part of the team When preparing this presentation I asked my team for their input. They also came up with some ideas they would like to share: Students also cross train other IT and create support departments! They use the software regularly - They participate in ITEAM - they hear what the end user is saying about the software. They can share that UX response if we find a better way to track it. Automated testing – is it possible? BUY IN AS COMMUNUTY MEMBERS
- Building upon the work we do together as a team can also build to doing things together as people. As the students are such great workers, it is easy to forget that they are halfway around the globe from their home. Building upon this friendship also affords a great working relationship. We respect and admire these people tremendously!
- What Student QA teams provides is a solution to instructors' technical questions in addition to firsthand experience for student workers AND IS COST EFFECTIVE as it is now even STUDENT RUN. Student & Faculty Feedback The students who have participated in Sakai QA testing have gone on to lead successful lives in the information technology and customer service workforce. See quote
- Quote: Just heard back from Thomson Reuters and I got the job! It looks like I get to go to England for 1-2 weeks for training as well. Hopefully I get a better job title than Operations Training Implementation Support... I can easily say that it was because of my experience with training, iTeam projects, and iLearn that I even had the chance of getting this job so I cannot thank you guys enough.
- In the end – we are institutions of higher education. Our students can take from this experience all the tools, processes, procedures, customer service and technical skills that we have shared here. They will be better employees for what they have learned with us. Our hope is they will always feel welcome in a community that is 100% OPEN.