SITS Developer

Ethnicity and Highest Qualification Attained

Project Duration

February 2016 to March 2016

Project Summary

Alteration to existing stored procedures and SITS:Vision / e:Vision functionality in order to report on and allow changes to the ethnicity and highest qualification fields in the STU table

Project Details

Due to statutory changes, there was a need to allow students to record in e:Vision their highest qualification and ethnicity. I was responsible for ensuring that these two new fields were included across a range of stored procedures, views and functions. It was also necessary to amend QA's implementation of Stu-Talk in order to reference these two new fields. I worked closely with another developer to ensure that he was able to include these two new fields in various management-level Excel reports.

Event Monitoring Report

Project Duration

January 2016 to February 2016

Project Summary

Excel driven report to tally a range of activities (i.e. lecture, seminar or both) with a corresponding absence record, and to report on any anomalies found. An anomaly would usually suggest a lecturer had failed to take a register for the event, and the report would list all such anomalies during the reporting period.

The user is able to run the report given a wide range of selection criteria (reporting period, course group, campus, etc.)

Project Details

Similar to the Attendance Monitoring Report developed previously, but focus was on looking at event records (EVE, EVI and EVA) and trying to match these up with absence records (SAB); the rationale here being to try to identify tutors who have a timetabled event that has not had a register recorded for that event. As with the ‘Attendance Monitoring Report’, the user running the report was able to select one or more criteria:

• Reporting period
• Course group (user able to select one or more course groups)
• Campus (user able to select one or more campuses)
• Tutor
• Activity Type (e.g. lecture / seminar)

Attendance Monitoring Report

Project Duration

November 2015 to January 2016

Project Summary

Excel driven report to allow support staff the means to query student attendance at lectures and seminars based on a range of criteria (reporting period, course group and campus).

Project Details

Whilst based on existing similar reports, this was a new report providing information on student attendance on specific course groups based on a range of criteria selected by the user:

• Reporting period
• Course group (user able to select one or more course groups)
• Campus (user able to select one or more campuses)

I was responsible for creating a new stored procedure that would take the user’s selection criteria, extract the data from SITS and present the data in a format suitable for inclusion in an Excel spreadsheet. A second developer was responsible for taking the output from my stored procedure and using this to populate said spreadsheet.

Database development was undertaken in Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio 2012, using Microsoft Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server for source control.

During development, it was necessary to create new tables to retrieve semester details (e.g. begin and end date for current semester); and also to modify an existing view in order to retrieve student personal detail (SPD) and fee status information.

The stored procedure created had several complex parts to it:

• Requirement to report on several reporting periods (e.g. current / previous semester, previous four weeks, user-defined reporting period)
• Use of temporary tables to avoid use of cursors and iteratively reduce size of data-set
• Pivoted tables with dynamically populated column headings, executed through the ‘EXEC’ command
• New function created in order to ‘coalesce’ multiple rows into a single field ([QABS-SDT].[FN_AttendanceMonitoringReport_Notes].sql)
• New function created to get time period for a semester based around a course group code (‘Semester setup script.sql’)

Not quite a full-blown project, a mini project is a significant piece of work scoped, tested and implemented using normal software development methodology. A mini project will typically be an improvement to a business process, introducing efficiencies and reducing complexity where possible.

Incident Resolution

Project Duration

November 2015 to March 2016

Project Summary

Resolution of IT helpdesk support tickets

Project Details

Assisted both with the creation, documentation and handover process surrounding the creation of staff SITS accounts.

Resolved a problem affecting the availability of timetables in the live instance of SITS e-Vision.

Resolution of many other ad-hoc queries and problems, all within SLA.

Photograph Import / Export

Project Duration

February 2016 to March 2016

Project Summary

Process documented to bulk import student photographs

Project Details

Created and documented a process to allow administrative staff the means to bulk import student photographs and store these as related documented using DCU. I then created an SRL to allow export of student photograph data into a spreadsheet, suitable for use in card printing software.

Improvements to Customer De-duplication Report

Project Duration

January 2016 to February 2016

Project Summary

Several bugs fixed and general improvements made to performance

Project Details

QA maintains a large database of customers and contacts that require regular imports and updates. Part of this import process involves checking for duplicate customers. A user reported a problem with this customer de-duplication report (stored procedure) and I was responsible for investigating the issue.

Changes made:

• Typing mistake found and corrected (when comparing two company URLs)
• Created function to strip out all non-digits from telephone numbers, thereby improving record matching success
• Performance improvements. Numerous changes made to stored procedure, resulting in execution time reduction from ~2 minutes to ~40 seconds.

Notification email for withdrawn students

Project Duration

December 2015 to January 2016

Project Summary

New TUP and SRL created for automated notification email

Project Details

A new TUP was created to monitor changes to the enrolment status of all SCE records. When the enrolment status changed to either 'WS' or 'NC', a process would trigger to send an email to the IT helpdesk, informing them of the change. A new SRL was created for this notification email.

Amendments to SRLs - Proof of Attendance

Project Duration

November 2015 to December 2015

Project Summary

Updating and improving functionality / appearance of several SRLs associated with a student's proof of attendance.

Project Details

QA has several SRLs used to prove that a given student is actively enrolled on a course; these SRLs are typically required by councils, banks, etc.

Due to the expansion of QA across multiple locations, it was necessary to tailor these SRLs to reflect a student’s base campus. Previously, the SRLs were only required for students based at a single campus.

Based around SPR, the SRLs were amended to automatically retrieve a student’s campus based on the ‘Location’ field. Additionally, an existing SLP was amended in order to show a different logo dependent on the student’s campus.