Stuff We Do

The WebDev team is part of a group of four digital delivery teams in the department of Information Services.

WebDev team remit covers the implementation and development of the University online brand, and development and support of the web publishing platform. We are currently actively engaged in a rethink of the architecture and design of the core University website to bring it firmly up to date with a coherent set of modern user-centered design principles.

Key services

We also cover a range of other central services (both public and internal), such as University blogs, the Student Guide, course web prospectus system, XCRI data feeds, online maps, Clearing system, internal staff directory, and news and events systems.

Oh and about 20 other key services. We have a lot of different customers from around the university. Yes, we do a lot!!

Agile

We can only deal with this heavy workload with a very thorough and organised Agile development process, with regular kanban-style business-as-usual mini-sprints. We have dedicated scrum master and product owner positions to help us manage our diverse range of products and customers.

We are strong advocates of Agile. We’ve tried other processes like waterfall and they just didn’t work. So we’re engaged in promoting Agile processes and helping other teams sort out what works best for them.

UX

The webdev team offers strong UX skills, with Jonathan Thirlwell heading up UX development. We are actively engaged in establishing online brand guidelines, and a number of UX and design principles, which should also appear soon on our UX website.

PHP/js

We have a cross-section of web development skills mainly focussed around PHP and javascript. The webdev world changes so very quickly, so we use the best tools for the task at hand, rather than stick rigidly to a single platform.

However we do tend to reuse things like: Laravel, Flight, Bootstrap, less, as well as utilities like grunt, composer, bower, selenium, PHPUnit… We use capistrano for code deployment, and have experimented with vagrant for accurate dev build environments.

Github

We use github extensively (of course), and led the adoption of github among other dev teams in the department. Sadly we’re not able to open most of our repos, although we do have a few that have been allowed to be opened to the world…