Running Head: POST-IMPLEMENTATION UNIVERSITY WEBSITE UPGRADE 1
Post-Implementation University Website Upgrade
Michael Decker
Western Governors University
POST-IMPLEMENTATION UNIVERSITY WEBSITE UPGRADE 2
Post-Implementation University Website Upgrade 3 Quality Assurance 4
Formative Evaluation and QA Metrics 4 Testing Methodology 5 Test Cases 5 Acceptance Criteria 6
Project Review 6 Assumptions 7 Project Phases 8 Timeline Deviations 10 Project Dependencies 10 Resource Requirements 10 Implementation Project Milestones 11 Project Deliverables 11 Documentation Deliverables 12
Formative Evaluation Results and Revisions 12 Summative Evaluation Plan and Results 13 Stakeholder Communication Plan and Reports 13 Ongoing Support and Maintenance 14
Resources for Post-Implementation Support 14 Short and Long Term Maintenance Plan 14
Post-Implementation Project Summary 15 Documentation Deliverables 16 Success Criteria for Each Project Outcome 16 Justification of Proposed Versus Actual Project Outcomes 17 Lessons Learned 18
Tables 20
POST-IMPLEMENTATION UNIVERSITY WEBSITE UPGRADE 3
Post-Implementation University Website Upgrade
In a previous project, the University website service, built on Drupal 7, was migrated
from an on-site server to a cloud hosting provider. After the completion of that project, it was
time to focus on the evolution of the service provided for the University community. Drupal 7 is
coming close to its end-of-life and soon will be unsupported. The end-of-life posed a problem
due to its lack of security updates from the Drupal security team. To provide a safe and secure
website service, it was necessary to build a new University CMS built on Drupal 8, the latest
version. The new Drupal 8 system will be able to evolve and easily migrate into Drupal 9 with
little effort (Hojtsy, 2020). Because of that, the system will be capable of security updates for at
least 5 more years.
The Drupal 7 CMS provided to the University had a dated appearance and it was slow
and lacked functionality that could be found in competitors like Squarespace. The project was to
build a new system with a modern appearance that would have a wide assortment of features.
The system was planned to be functional for the majority of the sites previously on the Drupal 7
platform. The project began with a discovery phase to analyze and categorize the Drupal 7 sites.
The analysis of the old sites provided information about what features were most commonly
used. The data provided was passed to a design phase to build a modern and attractive website
theme, using the University identity guidelines. The designs were then passed on to the
developers to build the appropriate functionality. The project initially launched a service with
some reduced functionality compared to the old service. Communication was provided to the
University community about the plans for future features. This allowed site owners the ability to
plan for their migration onto the new platform. Those additional features were released on a
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monthly basis to expand the functionality of the system and give the site owners the tools they
required. Towards the end of the project, new requisitions on the old Drupal 7 system was shut
down. All new sites had to be built on the newly built Drupal 8 platform.
Quality Assurance
Quality assurance was implemented throughout the project. Several implementations
were done to validate accurate development and ensure deliverables were met correctly. The
outcomes of these enforced the strength and the reliability of the project and the deliverables it
produced.
Formative Evaluation and QA Metrics
In the early phases of the project, a requirements documentation was built after reviewing
the functionality of the old Drupal 7 system. The requirements were then put into tickets to be
completed by the development teams. Based on the original requirements, 92% of the
functionality was completed successfully. After some work was completed, the remaining 8% of
the requirements were viewed as no longer necessary. The completed tasks were then manually
reviewed for quality assurance and through legal compliance. All necessary requirements were
fulfilled in regard to legal compliance.
Since the project used an Agile methodology it was useful to view the larger scope of
each phase of the project as an “Epic”. The epics were then scoped and sized appropriately.
During each phase of the project the tasks to implement each phase changed, but the overall
completion percentage of each phase was monitored closely. As the phase progressed there was a
clear progression towards the goal of each phase.
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Testing Methodology
Testing was implemented in several ways. During the initial discovery phase, user testing
was done on the old Drupal 7 system to discover requireme
