On the Road to IRIS: Modules & Testing

IRIS is a name you’ll be hearing me talk a lot about this year on here and in the flesh.  It’s the name we’ve given to the prospective new research information management system that our Research Office, ITS and library teams are working towards implementing.  My involvement is naturally on the repository side of things, considering how the LRA will integrate with the new system. We’re in early days as of yet, and the inks not quite dry on the supplier contract yet so I can’t speak too much about that.

What I did want to blog about was the related LRA work we’re currently doing.  One of the long standing requirements for the IRIS project is to upgrade to DSpace version we currently use (1.4.2. fact fans) to something…a little more this decade (1.7).  An upgrade to the software has been something I’ve been trying to move towards for the past couple of years, and now we’re moving towards this at speed I couldn’t be happier.

It looks like we’re going to have a test instance of the platform up and running in the next few days, and so I’m starting to think about two critical things for the live system.  The modules that are essential for the way the modern repository needs to run, and the kind of testing that we need to put the test instance through so we can be sure it’s running sweet and dandy and fine as candy.  I’ve some ideas already, some from my repository wishlist others from ideas that have come to me while I’ve been talking with the other members of the IRIS team.

But naturally I’ll welcome suggestions from any readers of the blog or pointers to resources that I clearly should already know about testing DSpace…but clearly don’t!