As the Technical Board of the ILIAS Society we are tasked to devise strategies that guide the development of ILIAS. These strategies are based on the ILIAS Manifest and the ILIAS Vision, which were both adopted by the general assembly of the ILIAS Society.
The last two years have been humbling and require some adjustments of our ambitions and of the perception of our current status. The project to support PHP 8 doubled the time for the release cycle of ILIAS 8. Shortfalls in our resources as well as problems in the code base have become obvious. Ever increasing requirements and awareness for security and the steady speed of the development in PHP and the web ecosystem put an additional strain on the development process. Also, the general insight that ILIAS can not just grow to do even more is taking root in the community. Many additions and adjustments in this strategy are informed by this insight.
But there also is a lot of positive development and progress in our community. Many goals which we have set in the previous strategy have been achieved by now and thus have been removed from this paper. New forms of cooperation have been established and contributions to all parts of our software and community have grown. This puts us in an excellent position to tackle the challenges ahead. We are proud to be part of such a great community.
As a Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS), ILIAS has been carried by a strong and active community for many years. The whole process of developing ILIAS towards our vision and of implementing our strategies is based on this community and goes far beyond writing code. Everyone in the community should be able to contribute to this great application according to their individual strengths.
We set the following goals:
- Extraordinary contributions and efforts from our community members are show-cased and honored in an appropriate way.
- Since requirements have increased for all parts of ILIAS, the number of maintainers, test-case-authors, testers, and contributors of any kind grows proportionally. The resources provided by these people are used efficiently according to the skills of the individuals.
- The ILIAS Society ensures that established tools are used and maintained. Working with the tools becomes more effective and and efficient.
- The concepts and terminology used in the application are shared by users, learning specialists, and developers. They are fully documented and consistently used in code, in READMEs, in the feature wiki and all other texts and publications. This is a prerequisite to understand if and how ILIAS can be used, configured, and extended.
- Discussions in our community are welcome and are always based on our core values and factual arguments. We minimize losses in productivity and motivation, caused by interpersonal disagreements.
The salience of data security and privacy in the political and social discourse is increasing. Organizations heavily rely on IT tools for their daily work. The accuracy and availability of central services is crucial. ILIAS is used in environments where the generated data is used when making high stakes decisions. Requirements on ILIAS thus have increased too. People and organisations should be able to rely on ILIAS' qualities regarding security, privacy, and availability.
We set the following goals:
- The methods to assess and increase code quality, that we have developed for and during the PHP 8 project, will be employed regularly in our development process. They are continously strengthend and enhanced to steadily improve the quality of our existing code and assess new code.
- We already have various automatisms and approaches that individual developers can use to improve their contributions to ILIAS. These tools are used naturally throughout our development process and thereby brought to full fruition.
- The accessibility for automatism (probably: automation) of our code base and processes is steadily increased. Automatisms are used or added to our procedures when their overall impact on our resources is positive.
- The insights and methods that we use to implement secure software are strongly supported by the services in our software. Every interface makes it simple to do the right and secure thing while making it hard to degrade the security of the system.
- Our approach to process security issues is improved. Short term mitigations are published even faster, while the root causes for the issues are identified and mid or long term efforts to remove them are devised and tracked reliably. Security considerations and issues have a high priority in all development activities.
- We only include dependencies from other projects if they fit our requirements regarding security and general reliability. Dependencies are checked for each release and vetted thoroughly.
- Privacy issues and requirements are supported in a similar manner as security and accessibility issues and requirements. A strong framework of technical and procedural mechanisms to track and find personal data exists, that allows administrators to understand the data that ILIAS stores.
ILIAS is used all around the world in various languages by universities, institutions of public service, companies and schools of various sizes. Among the users are many individuals with special needs, digital immigrants as well as experts in e-learning. ILIAS users can already rely on existing measures to receive a consistent user experience in the whole system.
We are proud and thankful that expert groups provide their skills for the user interface design with regards to simplicity, effectiveness, design for error and visibility as well as to guarantee a good accessibility accompanied with a consistent and diverse language to meet the requirements of an increasingly more diverse target group.
The UI framework has been established as a tool for developers to create a predictable user interface with special regards to accessbility throughout all ILIAS components. As the Technical Board we are happy to see more and more legacy elements being replaced by the framework equivalents. The inventory of the UI components grows through large community projects.
We do not set new goals here. We instead ask everyone to make sure that we stay on the awesome trajectory we are currently on.
ILIAS targets a huge variety of institutions with different sizes, diverse didactic requirements, and a wide range of use cases. It needs to be adaptable to the different requirements arising under these circumstances without compromising other key factors of quality software, e.g. ease of use and maintainability. A growing user base with different backgrounds increases the importance of this aim, but makes it also harder to achieve it.
We set the following goals:
- The design of interfaces between different components is an integral part of our engineering efforts. Interfaces are well structured and follow the interface segregation principle. All services contain a README with thorough documentation of their purpose and on how they can be used providing or pointing to examples of their usage.
- An open process is established which enables the integration of components based on quality criteria. This process is supported by technical measures and checks, as well as by audits of professionals. Adding components to and removing them from ILIAS is equally simple. As the ILIAS platform evolves, compatibility and upgrade paths across releases are ensured by appropriate upgrade processes and deprecation markings.
- Mechanism that allow ILIAS to be easily adapted to the diverse situation found in its user base and beyond are implemented and documented. Developers and users can easily swap, mix, and match parts of ILIAS. ILIAS provides a consolidated, reliable, and sustainable component system to create feature rich applications.
Modern devices are connected to an ubiquitous network of computers. Modern software needs to support that mode of operation. We thus cannot just think of ILIAS as a stand-alone software but instead need to understand it as a small part of a huge system of connected components. The environment for our development effort is similar. We are not alone but depend on other projects and people. We want ILIAS and its community to collaborate with other organisations and systems, to share work and learn from each other.
We set the following goals:
- ILIAS provides a well-defined API that makes it easy to connect ILIAS to other systems on the front- and backend.
- We diligently select the standards and interfaces we want to implement in ILIAS. When doing so, we also seek to understand the implications and opportunities for our system and implement according adjustments.
- We participate in efforts to define standards and contribute to the general ecosystem. The free/libre and open source communities and learning communities can and should benefit from our knowledge and code, just as we benefit from theirs. We shall cooperate closely with communities that share our values and challenges.
Just as with the strategies before, we, the Technical Board, will use this paper to derive consistent measures and argumentations in concrete situations. Thus, by knowing and understanding this strategy paper, people should be able to understand and anticipate our actions at least approximately. Transparency is important for effective leadership.
We hope that everyone involved in this community will feel inclined to adopt these goals and act accordingly. Use this paper in decision making, discussions, when setting priorities and whenever you see fit. We are so much stronger when we pull in the same direction.