TL;DR: Educators using our course import tools would occasionally get blocked from progressing. Aside from no clear steps, the resolution required edX development and partner support team assistance, delaying authoring and publishing timelines for courses. Now that educators can now triage the issues themselves, we have seen no new development bug reports since release. This change will also help T&L meet our H2 goal of proactively addressing major sources of escalation for our team, (from 23 issues / month to ~10/month projected).
TL;UseEmoji: ⚠ 😈 😥 💨💨💨💨 ✨🦸♀️ 🚄
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Key talking points for customers:Why work on this area of the platform?The T&L group had a goal of reducing its escalation tickets per month from 23/month to 14/month as a way to advance the platform health of the areas we own. Import bug reports accounted for ~5 tickets per month, a large fraction of our escalations volume. With this improvement, we are now closer to 10 tickets per month overall across T&L. As noted above, these bugs impacted our partner support team and development team through 5-8 time-intensive requests each month.
Who will notice the change, and where?
In many ways, a second part answer to the “why work on this area of the platform” has to do with the educators impacted by these issues. Educators Course authors blocked by the import tool might be unable to update or launch their course without edX intervention but now they will see specific error messages in the course import area of Studio. A full list of messages shown to educators is /wiki/spaces/PT/pages/2594275334.
For developers, we now have New Relic dashboards to help make import errors and attempts observable. Additionally, documented Splunk queries will help developers or support team members triaging reported import bugs in the future.
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Monthly Escalation Ticket Reduction
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In 2018, import/export bugs accounted for ~5.8 partner support tickets a month, as well as ~3 development team tickets over the course of the year. (~9/month)
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In 2020, import bugs dropped to ~3.6 partner support tickets, with ~4.6 development tickets per month as well. (~8/month)
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In 2021 through April we continued previous year trends for support + development tickets.
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Via Emilio Rodriguez (Deactivated) 's data review, we now see that partner support tickets are now much easier to resolve (and many partners are now able to resolve their issues before even reaching out to partner support! )
Thanks to the work done by the TNL team we have been able to identify the problem in a blink of an eye. The export provided the exact location of the unit triggering the error. This is a huge time saver comparing how we handled tickets in 2020. The same ticket we worked this morning in 10 minutes or less. it would have been a CR, or full morning investigation trying to find the error message in Splunk, plus import/exporting the course multiple times until identifying the real problem. - Emilio Rodriguez (Deactivated)
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Credits / A Group Effort!
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