Overview
Background
The Timetabling service is delivered via a number of applications and interfaces. There are a number of applications that are delivered by our third party supplier (Scientia Ltd). Scientia release upgrades to the core applications each year. The current service is based on 3.10 and this will be replaced by a service based on 3.12
Rather then upgrade in situ, the project will use the upgrade plan and approach delivered by TTU009, and will build a suite of parallel environments which will replace the existing 3.10 DEV,TEST, LIVE and TRN environments.
The new environments will have the additional benefit of being based on Windows 2012 and will have applied SQLserver 2014, as currently used by Scientia in their development environments.
The first stage of the project will build the new 3.12 DEV environment which the Timetabling team will test to confirm that the business wishes to proceed with the upgrade to 3.12. The project will then build the remaining environments in paralell with the corresponding existing environments which are based on Scientia 3.10 software. The project will also investigate whether some deliverables from the annual roll-forward project (SDB and webapps) can be incorporated into the upgrade and whether automation can be used to improve the efficiency of delivering these annual steps.
As the upgrade will be delivered by providing the service in a paralell environment, the following applications will be affected and all will be tested during UAT.
- SDBs
- Reporting DBs
- SDB Listeners
- Portal
- Enterprise Applications (ET, RDM, ECP)
- Hot Images
- Web Applications (Staff/Student WRB, Web Timetables, PADS, Onelan)
- SPDAs
The following applications will not be affected but will have to be repointed to the new datasources and will be included in functional testing:
- Course Timetable Browser
- Bookable Rooms
- Learn Building Block
- SSRS
- BI Suite
- MyEd channels
- PADS
- OneLan
Scope
Testing of 3.12 upgrade against business requirements
Investigation of incorporation of some annual roll-forward steps into upgrade process
For avoidance of doubt, the following items are not within the scope of this project:
- Any change to the disaster recovery or resilience solutions or service levels for the Timetabling service.
- Disaster recovery testing ( carried out recently as part of TTu007)
Objectives and Deliverables
No | Description | Teams | Priority | Notes |
| Stage 1 - analysis | ||||
O1 | Ensure that the upgrade is fit for purpose, checking that changes to applications or infrastructure including downstream systems are not negatively impacted. | |||
D1 | Review the release notes for the upgrade to 3.12, and amend the existing build document as required | IS APPS | M | agreed would start in 14/15 - now achieved |
D2 | Carry out a standalone non production environment installation, testing the features as well as carrying out regression testing - this will be limited to Enterprise Applications, Hot Image, SDB, RDB and UoE Views | IS APPS/TTU | M | agreed would start in 14/15 - now achieved |
| D3 | Make a recommendation whether or not to proceed or not with 3.12 in the DEV, TEST, LIVE and TRN environments | IS APPS/TTU | M | agreed would start in 14/15 - now achieved |
| Stage 2 - build and acceptance | ||||
| O2 | Deliver the 3.12 software into each of the new environments ensuring that a consistent set of environments is left at the end of the project. | |||
| D4 | Agreed method of change control to operate for all environments during duration of this project | IS APPS/TTU | M | Aim is to restrict configuration changes in 3.10 environments to essential change only - so that these can be recorded and applied to 3.12. |
| D5 | Create the remaining three paralell environments, with Scientia 3.12 software installed. (TEST, LIVE and TRN) | IS APPS | M | |
| D6 | Carry out functional testing on remaining three environments and interfaces ( TEST, LIVE and TRN) | IS APPS/TTU | M | |
| D7 | Test the 3.12 RDB presents in the same way as 3.10 so that all interfaces can connect as expected. | IS APPS | M | |
| D8 | Investigate roll-forward of SDB and automation of webapps roll-forward as part of upgrade | IS APPS | M | If incorporated will transfer budget from roll-forward project |
| D9 | Agree load test scenarios and carry out load testing | IS APPS/TTU | M | |
| D10 | Prepare test plan and carry out full UAT on new LIVE environment. Signoff to include incoming interfaces. | TTU | M | TTU to circulate |
| Stage 3 - Delivery | ||||
| O3 | Switchover from current LIVE, TEST, DEV and TRN environments to new 3.12 environments | |||
| D11 | Transfer data from current LIVE SDB into new 3.12 LIVE environment and switch production service to new 3.12 LIVE. | IS APPS | M | |
| D12 | Transfer data from current LIVE SDB into new 3.12 TEST environment and switch test service to new 3.12 TEST. | IS APPS | M | |
| D13 | Transfer data from current LIVE SDB into new 3.12 DEV environment and switch development service to new 3.12 DEV. | IS APPS | M | |
| D14 | Transfer data from current LIVE SDB into new 3.12 TRN environment and switch training service to new 3.12 TRN. | IS APPS | HD | |
| O4 | Prepare training material for any adopted new features | |||
| D15 | Training manuals and testing material (to be delivered by timetabling unit) | TTU | D | |
| Stage 4 - legacy | ||||
| O5 | Remove legacy servers | |||
| D16 | Decomission 3.10 LIVE, TEST, DEV and TRN environments | IS APPS | M |
Benefits
The main benefit of adopting the upgraded software is the continued support of the third party supplier Scientia. Typically when operating an older version of the software bug fixes will not be considered and any fixes will typically require an update, Scientia do not traditionally support patching and back porting of fixes.
The secondary benefits in this particular upgrade are the introduction of some new features:
- Offline Enterprise Timetabler is made available and allows the use of Enterprise tools in an offline capacity, which was previously limited to the older desktop application (Syllabus Plus Classic)
- Large scale data changes reduced, the datasync module has been improved to allow quicker refreshes of information into Enterprise Timetabler. The benefit is yet to be proved but any reduction in refresh times would be greatly beneficial to the 300 users of Enterprise.
Additional secondary benefits from the paralell-build approach:
- The new servers will be based in Windows 2012
- SQLserver will be upgraded to 2014
- As a paralell LIVE environment will be created prior to switchiver to 3.12, immediate rollback of the LIVE environment will be possible. However if a rollback is required after a period of time, the benefit of the new approach will be dininished.
- The data in TEST, DEV and TRN will closely resemble that in LIVE
- Knowledge will be more practically shared amongst team members
Success Criteria
Stage 1
- Fully assess the impact of moving to 3.12 the timetabling service and make a clear recommendation about whether or not to proceed with the switch to 3.12
Stage 2
- Delivery of the 3.12 software into all of the new paralell environments ensuring a consistent configuration between environments is maintained (as agreed by change control process)
- Switchover from current LIVE,TEST,DEV and TRN environments to new 3.12 environments
- Continued successful operation of operational processes after switchover
- Delivery of the rolled-forward 16/17 SDB
- Investigation of automation of webapps roll-forward in new 3.12 environments.
- Preparation of any neccessary new documentation or training materials for timetabling users
- Decomissioning of legacy environments ( ie current LIVE,TEST,DEV and TRN)