Starlight: Sprint 3 (March 11-22, 2019)

What was the goal of Sprint 3?
Get the Starlight code deployed to our both campus staging servers and UCSB production servers, supporting single sign on with Shibboleth, and improving the test suite.

What is the milestone that this sprint is supporting?
Milestone 1 is to have an initial instance of the Spotlight platform in production for both campuses.

Accomplishments of Sprint 3:

• Added initial UC Santa Barbara theme incorporating the new campus brand identity. Added documentation for how to create new Starlight themes.
• Consolidated configuration files into a single strategy based on using environment variables. Documentation was also created in support of this new strategy. This is especially important in the context of our collaborative environment.
• Added Google Analytics support.
• Added Sidekiq message queue support in both the application and Ansible configuration for staging and production environments.
• Fixed local Docker-based development environment.
• Made significant progress towards configuring Shibboleth, using Ansible, as a multi-campus solution.
• Deployed code to UCSB staging server.

Did we do everything we set out to accomplish?
No. The team has experienced several blockers leading up to, and during, this sprint: trouble with GitLab licensing and Shibboleth. Our trial license of GitLab Gold expired before we could finalize our open source licensing agreement. Santa Barbara’s campus purchasing office is still working with GitLab to get this resolved, but losing Gold has been a hindrance towards progress. Configuring Shibboleth using Ansible as a multi-campus solution has taken more time than anticipated, especially coupled with Santa Barbara Enterprise Technology Services’ immaturity in providing support to locally hosted applications. The team has made a commitment to get something deployed to San Diego’s staging server as soon as possible, even if that means deploying with database authentication.

However, that is not to say that the team hasn’t been busy working on developing new features in support of stakeholder requirement!. We have a large amount of work, notably the support for PDFs, local batch ingest, and theming, that is queued up for deployment and stakeholder review. Once we are able to get the code deployed to both staging environments, we will be reaching out for testing and feedback.

Our goal for the Sprint 4 remains the same -- getting the Starlight code deployed on both campuses.

GitLab link: https://gitlab.com/surfliner/surfliner/-/milestones/8