What do the following words have in common:  Votes, Issues, and Poker?

If you answered, “All that went into developing the newest release for Admissions,” you’d be correct. Just like all releases, we depend on your feedback through the Votes on UserVoice and the Issues you create through Support. But Poker?

We’ve made changes and employed new techniques in the way releases get developed.  Here’s how it works:

• We create “User Stories” for each release that describe the desired functionality. We outline who the feature is for, what they want to accomplish, and why.
• Then a game of “Poker” is played to determine the order the Stories should be developed based on the amount of “Points” each story is worth.
• By doing some quick analysis on the total number of points assigned per User Story, we can appropriately package the release into functionality that is usable right away.

The Admissions release that went live on September 28th is one of the first projects to use this Poker method – more are well on their way.

So what enhancements survived the round of poker and made it to development for release?

There were a number of issues we addressed. Returning 37 votes within UserVoice is:
The creation of a new task for Admissions Staff to create candidates from existing families who are currently in the system.

What makes this great? Saves you time, increases your efficiency.

With this task, you:

• Search for the existing parent and create a candidate that is related to him/her as a child/sibling.
• No longer need to create an Inquiry for this person and then search for a duplicate parent.
• Simply enter the first name, last name, entering year, entering grade, checklist and determine what the interests are.
• Save this new candidate and are immediately directed to the Admissions Profile.

What if that individual has already been entered in the system as a sibling?  Do I have to fill out an Inquiry form and then search for the duplicate?
The answer is a resounding “NO!!!”  Using the same task, you can:

1. Search for an existing user
2. Select that user
3. Make him/her a candidate by defining the entering year, entering grade, checklists and interests (if necessary)

It couldn’t be more simple.

We included more features in this release. Stay tuned for the other improvements we made in that round of poker. All of the cards have not yet been laid on the table.