Process

I am the head of tech for the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction, a small 501(c)(3) non-profit consortium of mostly US law schools. I'm the sole developer/admin for our Drupal 7 website www.cali.org. The site gets between 3,000 & 5,000 unique visitors a day, mostly law students who spend upwards of an hour per visit working on the online tutorials that are our main product. We've been running the site on Drupal 7 for nearly a decade after migrating it from Drupal 6.

Title
Your Requirements Sherpa: A Business Analysis Case Study

Description
It’s an all too common tale: your project is over budget and late to launch because of misunderstandings of what was intended to be built in the first place. There can be many causes of this, including the following: 

Case studies are great sales tools. But how many times have you gotten ready to submit a pitch, and realized you were missing case studies for the projects you want to highlight? You assumed somebody on the team would write one after the projected deployed, but everyone got reassigned to other projects, and it slipped through the cracks, again. And now you are sad. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Any major data platform, like Drupal, requires you to load data before going live (sometimes a lot of data), and it is important to plan your data migration as carefully as any other part of the launch. Aaron Crosman from Attain Partners will give a talk about questions to ask yourself when planning that data migration. Aaron will provide questions you can pose to help ensure your plan makes sense and will lead to success.

Upgrading a site to the latest major core release can be a difficult time, with some huge changes that often require a complete rebuild of the site. I'll guide you through the process to help you plan upgrading a site from Drupal 6, 7 or 8 to Drupal 9.

We’ve all been there. A large, complex project launches, but the project manager and/or client hadn’t seen the point in wasting time on testing. “You know what you’re doing – why do we need to pay extra?” Then, you watch helplessly as the launch goes off the rails and all that money that was saved by not doing testing is instead spent on hotfixes and emergency workarounds. 

Come for the code, stay for the community.

Drupal thrives on community contributions in the form of patches and documentation to both contributed modules and core. This helps the project move forward and stay relevant.

During this session, Jason will discuss his experience of creating and adopting a contrib-first approach at Nerdery. He will highlight takeaways from his experience and review specific examples of contrib-first activities/tasks that a project team can undertake during a project's lifecycle.

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Your boss, client, or news anchor just announced it’s time to upgrade the technology stack:

"We choose to go to Moon Mars in this decade, not because it's easy, but because it is hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills..."

No! No! No!. . . let’s change the mindset here. 

In reality, no executive wants to work hard and wait a decade for success.