|
Uniface and its prototyping
approach to development have proved to
be a winning combination at Swedish
universities.
Customer:
LADOK
Industry:
Education
Challenge:
LADOK is an administrative system used
by all of Sweden’s major
state-funded higher education
establishments. Replacing an earlier
3GL system, the new system had to be
highly reliable and capable of rapid
evolution to keep pace with change to
the academic world. In particular the
system has had to become increasingly
sophisticated in tracking
students’ progress and reporting
it to government as funding became more
and more results-driven. The system has
also needed to change in response to EU
regulations.
Compuware
answer:
The LADOK team
chose Uniface as its development
environment. In addition to rewriting
the legacy system, it has carried out
over 40 successful enhancement
projects, continually adding new
functionality to the system. It uses an
agile development methodology, building
rapid prototypes with Uniface and,
after gaining user feedback, refining
them; eventually the prototypes become
part of the finished application. This
method enables the LADOK team to work
effectively with a demanding user
community. Until recently the system
has had to run on a variety of UNIX
platforms but it is now migrating to
Linux, which with Uniface is simply a
matter of recompiling the code.
Compuware solutions
used:
Compuware
Uniface
LADOK is an administrative
system for universities and colleges.
It belongs to a consortium of around 40
Swedish educational establishments and
is developed, maintained and operated
by a team of IT experts located at one
of the participating institutions, the
University of Umeå.
Academic establishments are these
days run along increasingly commercial
lines. “Ours is a
business-critical system that must be
available 24x7 and must produce
reliable results at all times,”
says Sören Berglund, head of the
LADOK division. “If our system
doesn’t work, no invoices are
produced, and so no-one gets paid.
Fortunately, using Uniface, we have
been able to develop a stable system
that meets those
requirements.”
LADOK is business-critical in
several ways. Not only does it support
funding and hence the payment of
salaries, but it is also vital to the
day-to-day running of the institutions,
providing large numbers of essential
statistical reports.
Institutions’ funding today
depends in part on the provision of
statistics relating to enrolment and
exams.
Like the world of commerce,
today’s universities are subject
to frequent administrative and
regulatory change. LADOK has had to
evolve fast since it was rewritten in
Uniface; for example, it now has to
track students’ progress and
report it regularly to the government
as a basis for funding decisions. Now
the LADOK team is amending the system
to standardise the grading system in
line with new EU regulations designed
to allow students to move between
countries taking their credits with
them.
The LADOK team has therefore used
Uniface to develop a further 40 or more
add-on systems since the rewrite. All
of these projects have been accounted a
success. “Uniface is a highly
productive tool that delivers business
functionality quickly,” says
project manager Stefan Lundkvist, who
has been responsible for many of those
developments. The team uses Uniface in
conjunction with an agile development
framework, DSDM, which requires the
production of rapid prototypes that
then evolve to become part of the live
application – an approach to
which Uniface is ideally suited
according to Stefan Lundkvist. As
well as the application, LADOK’s
computing environment is evolving.
Until recently the universities were
using a range of different UNIX
platforms, but a move to Linux is now
on the agenda. This poses no headaches
for the LADOK technical team since a
Uniface application can run on Linux as
happily as on Unix without any
additional work.
Why Uniface?
Back in the mid 1990s, Swedish
universities were running a legacy
system written in a 3GL. “It was
very outdated and so we set up a
project to do a complete
rewrite,” recalls Sören
Berglund. “At the same time we
wanted to create a solution that would
be easier to use and would offer a
Uniface graphical user interface
– this was before the web came
along.”
The team selected Uniface in 1994
following a careful investigation of
the tools market. Uniface came to its
attention as one of the most prominent
solutions in the marketplace. Important
selection criteria included
client-independence; initially the
system had to support three different
user interfaces. Independence of
databases and server platforms were
further plus points for Uniface.
Because it would produce a single set
of code that could operate across
multiple platforms, the LADOK team
identified Uniface as the solution that
would best support its aim of producing
a standard application for all the
institutions.
Enabling agile
development
Interestingly, several of the reasons
for the original choice still apply
today. In particular, Uniface’s
productivity means that it provides
excellent support for agile
development. LADOK decided to adopt the
agile methodology DSDM, and has found
that Uniface suits that approach
ideally.
DSDM (Dynamic Systems Development
Method) is a framework designed to
“deliver agile business solutions
on time”, in the words of the
DSDM Consortium. One of the underlying
concepts is that development can be
incremental; it is therefore essential
to be able to develop prototypes fast,
use them to elicit user feedback and
then redevelop fast based on that
feedback.
As Stefan Lundkvist says,
“With Uniface it’s easy to
create prototypes to make sure
you’re on track. Having created
the prototype, you can then continually
refine it until you get a finished
solution. You never have to throw
anything away.”
Agile development with Uniface suits
the academic environment well, he adds.
“Our users are very
quality-conscious and used to be
reluctant to make the sacrifices of
functionality that are inevitable if
projects are to meet their time and
cost constraints. Our current approach
helps the users understand the
relationship between time, resources
and quality. With Uniface prototypes,
we can actually show them what they
will be getting and what options they
have, so that they can decide what is
and isn’t essential. Once
they’ve decided, Uniface lets us
develop it fast.” The result is a
development environment that is
productive and also promotes close user
involvement – an essential
attribute of academic IT.
The agile approach with Uniface is
now firmly entrenched. Sören
Berglund says, “We’ve used
this approach for 40 or 50 projects
now, and all have been successful. We
owe a lot of that success to
Uniface.”
Platform-independence is another
feature that has remained important to
LADOK, particularly as Compuware has
introduced support for Linux. Recently,
the universities have decided to save
money by standardising their operating
environments. LADOK users are therefore
migrating from various Unix platforms
to Linux. Stefan Lundkvist says:
“Reducing the luxury of
flexibility is a relatively painless
way for the universities to control
costs. One reason we were able to
recommend it with confidence was that
with Uniface a move to Linux is no
problem – it’s just a
question of recompiling the code and,
of course, testing to ensure that
everything functions as
intended.”
The story so
far
Very soon after choosing Uniface in the
mid-1990s, the team had created a
system with all the functionality of
the legacy system, and more.
“Uniface is a very productive
environment – there’s
really no comparison with a 3GL,”
stresses Stefan Lundkvist. He points
out that the team had set up rigorous
guidelines and standards for its use of
Uniface, which have helped it to
maximise those productivity
benefits.
The system has quickly grown to be
far more complex than the one it
replaced. “It has 10 or more
times as much functionality,”
estimates Stefan Lundkvist. A
particular strength of the current
system is its ability to work with
class groups, following them as they
progress through the institution and
keeping track of credits and so forth.
This requirement has emerged since the
original rewrite because of a change in
the way institutional funding works.
Funding used to come in lump sums, but
now it’s derived from the number
of students the institution attracts
and the number of credits that they
achieve.
Sören Berglund comments,
“Uniface has helped us to respond
promptly to this significant change in
requirements – in effect, a move
to a market economy. We couldn’t
easily have coped with changes like
these with our old development
environment.”
LADOK’s 36 user institutions
co-own the software. Rather than all
running it in-house, they use several
regional computer centres. Each
institution has its own installation of
the system, with the combined
installations having up to 4,000 expert
users online simultaneously. These
expert users comprise administrators,
clerical staff and teachers; students
can access the same data via a
different system.
Although the universities have
differing requirements, they all run
the same code; LADOK has designed the
system to be highly configurable so
that all that is required to customise
the solution is to change the
parameters. “Having one version
has saved us a fortune,” says
Sören Berglund.
The future with
Uniface
Today’s academic environment is
as dynamic as any business sector.
Currently, the LADOK team is working on
a major enhancement to meet the
requirements of the European Credit
Transfer System (ECTS), also known as
the Bologna initiative. This European
Community standardisation project is
designed to allow students to move
between academic establishments in
different countries, taking with them
the credit points accumulated during
their studies. Among other
implications, this initiative requires
the use of a standard grade system in
all participating countries. Uniface is
helping the LADOK team to engineer the
necessary record-keeping and interfaces
into its applications.
Sören Berglund sums up:
“Uniface gives us an integrated
development facility. Having a good
repository means that we can achieve a
very high rate of productivity by
reusing procedures. And we know that we
can trust Compuware to go on providing
us with the functionality that
we’ll need in years to come.
Whatever we have to worry about,
it’s not technology
change.”
|
