#mozilla backpack

Before heading out to badge camp, many of our team members put together reflections on the past months leading up to badge camp and our hopes and dreams moving forward. 

Doug’s: http://dougbelshaw.com/blog/2013/07/21/badge-camp-2013/

Carla’s: https://carlacasilli.wordpress.com/2013/07/20/badge-camp-open-badges-badges/

Chloe’s: http://chloeatplay.tumblr.com/post/55901798994/a-flaneurs-thoughts-on-openbadges-pathways

Emily’s: http://emilygoligoski.com/2013/07/18/how-does-your-garden-grow-considering-open-badges-discovery/ 

Chris’: http://weblog.lonelylion.com/2013/07/16/badgecamp-13/ 

Mine: http://bananigans.tumblr.com/post/56134788716/badge-camp-here-we-come

Badge camp came and went and it was all I expected and much more. The team got the chance to unwind, debrief, reflect, brainstorm, get our hands dirty with making badges(!) no less, and get inspired and excited again about why we do what we do. 

As well as we work together in a distributed way, it's definitely a treat to be able to sit across with teammates in real time, face to face and discuss matters, react to and riff off one another. 

Such was the case as we broke off into smaller groups to discuss what we wanted to accomplish by Mozfest which will take place October 25 - 27 in London this year. 

The priorities and component pieces of the things we'll be working on from now till end of October is well outlined by Erin Knight, our team leader, here: http://worldofe.tumblr.com/post/56788139095/badge-camp

As part of the production backpack team, I thought I'd elaborate a bit further on our goals and what we intend to accomplish. 

What do we mean by production backpack? I mean this http://backpack.openbadges.org/backpack/login. I mean the backpack that is currently being utilized by the tens of thousands of badge earners who have pushed more than 100,000 badges into the open badges ecosystem so far. 

We made a lot of progress from beta to 1.0 release back in March at the DML conference but in the last minute push, we cut some corners and a few features fell by the wayside. In the next couple months we plan to make up for that by tackling the following:

(1) Clean up the codebase

We want to take this time to go back and clean up the code and lay down a more robust foundational framework. This will make it easier to layer on new features in an elegant way, while incurring less technical debt in the process. 

(2) Acceptance tests built into development process

We also want to build in acceptance tests into the development process. Acceptance tests are written in a human readable way that help developers and stakeholders like product managers align expectations of how the product should behave. 

You can read more about acceptance tests here and here.

With so many moving pieces in developing a product, documentation of agreed upon features and behaviors seems like an obvious thing to do. We intend to be more rigorous about capturing these in the form of acceptance tests moving forward. 

(3) Improving Backpack User Experience

We've made some user experience enhancements during the 1.0 release but admittedly in the last minute dash towards release, many of the design sketches created by our Creative Lead, Jess Klein were left on the editing floor. We want to pick those pieces back up, do some user testing on high fidelity wireframes with our community and make the experience more intuitive. 

From now until Mozfest, we'll be focusing on the login / sign up workflow, the issuer API modal badge push workflow as well as the existing backpack collections experience. 

We'll be reaching out to the community soliciting feedback and input.