Starlight: Sprint 13 (April 13- 26, 2022)

Starlight Sprint Review Recording: April 26, 2022

What was the goal of Sprint 13?
The Surfliner team has been experimenting with regular dedicated off-cycle sprints to focus on maintenance, upgrades, and new features for in-production products such as Starlight (in production since 2019). The goals of Sprint 13 were a combination of all of these things. A major goal of the sprint was to implement a new feature to allow for linking from the right-hand side of the homepage to related resources. Another was to clear the UCSB-specific blockers preventing the upgrade to Spotlight version 3 (for a variety of reasons primarily related to the timing of the original Starlight development and deployments, as well as the evolution of each campus’ infrastructure, UCSB and UCSD began the sprint running different versions of Starlight) and to move forward with the deployment of a dedicated documentation instance. The team also needed to address some visual bugs discovered by UCSD in version 3.0, fix a bug related to universal viewer, and do some general maintenance on the site.

Accomplishments of Sprint 13:
Fixed bug with rendering Carousel widgets in exhibit pages

  • Fixed Universal Viewer configuration so that embedded image URLs no longer break in future deployments
  • Fixed display of List, Gallery, and Masonry views in Search results of UCSD theme
  • Suppressed in-application analytics feature in favor of external analytics usage via the Google Analytics website
  • Enabled custom right hand navigation on landing page (Does not currently appear because we are waiting on stakeholders for desired content)
  • Added a Kubernetes CronJob to prune Devise guest accounts
  • Major version upgrade of our authentication library Omniauth
  • Support added to development environment for developers who have M1/ARM Macs
  • Converted our CI pipeline for Starlight to use new, supported, Rules syntax in Gitlab
  • Added a dedicated test Solr core to the docker-compose development environment
  • Automatically setup admin account and sample exhibit in docker-compose development environment and updated developer documentation accordingly

Did we do everything we set out to accomplish?
We made significant progress in this sprint. We were able to resolve all of the bugs and critical theme issues as well as a number of critical maintenance and security upgrades. The majority of the work required to upgrade UCSB to 3.0 was completed, however, the upgrade itself was not. Additionally, the deployment of a Surfliner instance of Starlight was not completed.

What’s next?
Since this was scheduled as a single off-cycle sprint, there is no formal follow-up sprint planned. However, UCSB has scheduled their 3.0 upgrade and the deployment of the Surfliner instance in their next local sprint. This will unblock a number of issues in the backlog.

GitLab link: https://gitlab.com/surfliner/surfliner/-/milestones/81