Architecture Challenges (2017-2018)

Arch-FED efforts:

• Paragon ownership and updates
• Micro-frontend runways
• Micro-frontend re-platforming

Publisher efforts to fix data synch issues

DevOps efforts:

• Kubernetes, Docker, and Config

Arch-BOM & Tools efforts:

• Toggle OEP
• Toggle reporting
• Toggle annotations

Enterprise efforts:

• edx-rbac library

Clear Best Practices - Debugging, API versioning

Monolith / New Features

14 

• Adaptive Learning features from OpenCraft needed to update settings, urls, and installed_apps. (Nov 2017)
• Enterprise app
• Completion app (Jan 2018)

• EDUCATOR-2618 (May 2018)

• Completion app, in separate repo, wants to receive signals from Grades app. (Jan 2018)

• Journals app needs to add new dashboard to list Journal purchases

• Journals app needs to display Journal related cards on LMS index listing pages

• "edX Portfolio" The Differentiated Paid team pursues creating new paid experiences, but ends up including it within the verified certificate experience - due, in part, to technical and business challenges. (Fall 2017)
• Journals: The White Label team is looking into creating a new product line for Digital Books and requires larger development effort to make it available in all places.  (Jan 2018)
• Certificate Product: Business rules baked into course mode string names prevent us from...  (Open edX ecosystem runs into this issue)
• Enrollments vs Entitlements: Issues have arisen from the way these two products co-exist.

Notes:

• Milestones
• Authorizations
• Business Logic on top of Base Example
  • ex: Programs type: XSeries / MicroMasters
  • ex. Credential type: Credit / Business
• MicroMasters vs Degrees 
• Course Modes logic

• Pagination should be common across edX. Currently we have a slightly modified DefaultPagination class in platform. analytics-data-api implements pagination slightly differently. If pagination was moved to edx-drf-extensions everyone could use! Likely other API building blocks living in openedx.core.lib.api could also be moved to be made reusable (Feb 2018)

Enterprise actively working on moving pagination to drf-extension.

To avoid breaking changes analytics-data-api response not updated.

Evaluation of core.lib.api classes ongoing. 

• Content Type Gating is requiring a new BlockTransformer as well as a new FieldDataOverride in order to force graded content to have a specific group_access field

• Adaptive Learning feature wants to add a new transformer. (Nov 2017)
• Completion app wants to add a new transformer and add new fields. (Oct 2017)
• ContentTypeGating required a new BlockTransformer (which required code changes, not just install+configuration)
• ContentTypeGating needed code changes to add a new xblock wrapper to the LMS
• FBE had to add code to access.py in order to further customize authorization.

Front End Development

9 

• Adaptive Learning feature wants to add a spaced-repetition review block on the Course outline. (Nov 2017)
• Growth: Diff Paid wants to add courseware pages (Jan 2017)
  • Learner Analytics
  • Portfolio Builder

• Educator Dahlia team adding new components that use Bootstrap which conflicts with the Legacy CSS. See this presentation for more details. (Jan 2018)

• Without a clear lead and/or team supporting the effort, there isn't clear stakeholder engagement between UX and development or even between development teams. Educator Dahlia has run into upgrade woes while upgrading studio-frontend mostly in the modal not meeting our use cases.
• The "asInput" component is the parent for a number of components and is in need of a refactor to support the numerous components are depend on it. It has evolved very piecemeal.
• Props and types are inconsistent and unclear between components, e.g. classNames are passed in as a string as opposed to a list.

• Educator Dahlia team and the FED Core team find that it is challenging to integrate React/Redux components with the existing Studio Backbone apps. (Jan 2018)

• The edx-platform frontend asset management needs a lot of work. The custom home-grown nature of it makes it hard to insert new technologies that are meant to be installed in fresh environments.

Changing or testing learner features

3 

TTV is affected when changes are required in edx-platform.

For experiments, although optimizely allows plugin of FED code, back-end changes are sometimes still required. Possible solutions may include additional apis or server-side hooks / code injection.

• Growth: Diff Paid is slowed down by edx-platform releases (Jan 2017) 
  • Learner Analytics
  • Portfolio Builder

• : Bumping platform's user API version to accommodate mobile's schedule seemed like enough work (large code surface, no prior art) that I found a different way to do it (Mar 2018)

Experimentation Tools: Need to duplicate configuration code for experimentation

NOTE - Workaround exits for now on this.

• Growth: Diff Paid wants to configure list of courses to use across optimizely experiments (Jan 2017)
  • Learner Analytics 
  • Portfolio Builder
  • Support

Releases / Pipeline

1 

• Updating the GoCD pipelines for IDAs was very challenging due to the complex nature of the code.  There are multiple competing abstractions and design approaches to creating a pipeline (August 2018) 

Environment Sync / Management (Stage, Sandboxes, Production)

5 

• There are many environment variables that need to be set to set up communications between ecommerce and LMS.
  • (LMS) EDX_API_KEY -> (ecommerce) EDX_API_KEY
  • (LMS) JWT_SECRET_KEY → (ecommerce) ECOMMERCE_API_SIGNING_KEY 
  • some things in (LMS) JWT_AUTH -> some things in (ecommerce) JWT_AUTH
  • (LMS) OAUTH2 → (ecommerce) Site Configurations
•  It's not clear what each configuration will do without digging into the code

• We've had multiple team members working on trying to set up Publisher on a sandbox and currently have this large document on how to do so: Publisher Sandbox 

• The docs for Enterprise also describe how to configure a sandbox, but the instructions seem out of date, and it's not clear where to go for authoritative information. Perhaps it's not reasonable to expect a wiki page full of screenshots and code snippets to be kept up to date. 

• We need to scrub it of PII, and the people that could sync might fear that we've haven't got an up to date list of where to scrub.
• There is a fear around deleting some stage data that people have manually entered for various tests.
• Loadtest servers that don't have representative amounts of data are not very useful for testing load.
• Likewise, stage grows less and less representative over time, and with fewer instances of newer features (like bundles/entitlements) because that's all manually entered.
• We have no standard way of scrubbing the data and no process in place to update tooling so that it stays up to date for what should be scrubbed.

Debugging & Investigation

1 

• Due to a fear that we might over log, no logs are written into a grading signal.  But in practice the ability to see what was happening when we backpopulated grades would have saved days of investigation into grades that were being skipped.  Clarity into how we use logging and what options we have for verbosity might have saved a lot of pain here. (Adjusting log levels, adding verbose flags to methods, etc) (August 2018)

Feature Toggle reporting is not automated (see OEP-17)

2 

• Several RCAs/e2e failures related to getting the bundling experiment on the dashboard out to Production. (Need to find links.)

• Here is an example ticket (LEARNER-5566) where the original intention of a waffle flag is unknown.

• Growth team's attempts to launch Bundles on Dashboard using feature flags (Jan 2017)

Data Duplication

5 

• (Early 2018) The Learner team has had some ongoing pain with the data copying between LMS and Credentials (sending of certificate and grade information). A fair amount of effort to set up syncing and the devops resources to keep it going. A long tail of backpopulating.
• GDPR / Platform team ran into an issue relating to this as well re: User / Segment IDs
• Revenue team ran into this in cases where Ecommerce cached User data isn't properly synced. 

• Dynamic pacing wants to translate emails in the course language (Spanish) and can't rely on the language in LMS' CourseOverview (English). (Oct 2017)

• Dynamic pacing creates schedules within a course based on course' start date.  Had to work around this issue by changing the business logic on how we updated schedule dates. (Oct 2017)