3 Hypothesis WorkFlow

Introduction

I’m Fabian Soto, an international student from Colombia, studying the Software Engineering Technology program at Centennial College. After having the opportunity to work in my first Co-op period developing OER material for the COLLab department, I felt the commitment to initialize an idea that now is becoming a reality for the future of the lab. Why not have students from each co-op join in the creation of an Openly licenced book about their findings along their working times?

Well, this is how things started and the reason why this book started come to life.

Here in this chapter, you will find valuable findings to work with Hypothesis notes in a methodical way. This could end up improving how you register, track, and finalized pending tasks with the benefit of having your work traceable and demonstrable / Verifiable. This method could be used for work, studies, academy, etc.

Lastly, you will find additionally an advanced way of working with Hypothesis tools developed by Jon Udell that could end up improving the way you approach annotations and make them more flexible.

A little bit of context

Once I was introduced to the initial OER project I worked on, our team was using hypothesis notes to know the things that needed to be addressed. Nothing more. Once we ended the review, we basically deleted one by one all the annotations as we finalized, reviewed, and addressed them. I have to say, it was a good methodology at the beginning, but it felt not quite optimal after a while.

The problem

As we started to get our hands on more projects, we started to realize the need for improvement in how things were managed and traced. We were using a combination of project management tools, google docs, with comments, but still, sometimes it got confusing when projects started to overlap.

The actual work on a particular section was more difficult to track as we frequently needed to update our progress inside all the docs, and management tools we were using as a team. Why is not possible to have everything in one place? Those this sound familiar?

Nowadays we can easily fall into the trap of having too many resources to track progress and this could end up in us forgetting which one of them has the most up-to-date information and indirectly, slowing the productivity of the team.

Why expend all that valuable time and work providing feedback and creating annotations to at one point lose all the records that could reflect valuable data to the team and project leads?

Benefits

Data is valuable

As a Software Engineer student joining the OER Lab department of Centennial College now called COLLab, I felt a sense of improvement in our processes. I started to play around with Hypothesis extension to the point where I started to find a way to use it more efficiently in a working environment where deliverables could be very valuable. A project that is easy to trace and follow is most likely to end well. Consequentially, this will end up creating a way to show up both the problems found and the solutions provided. These two are key to being able to properly evaluate the success of a project, workload, and completion.

Structure

Making project leads happy with a feel of completeness is always a good thing. This is very important because most of the time all the project leads or faculty members will have limited time to invest in the creation of an OER material. Each contact with the leads should always be meaningful and productive.

The value of organizing

One of the most valuable things to make sure a project succeed is the way we trace and follow up on all the changes that are being done, separating, and categorizing things in a way that it is easy to know which ones are completed, in progress or even belong to a particular category. Additionally, it will be very beneficial to have a way of annotating that is consistent and coordinated for all team members.

The Tags

In this section, you will find in the following table all the tags that I believe will be the most suitable ones for developing OER content, but feel free to coordinate with your workgroup the ones that work best for you.

Some of the names of the tags you will see are self-explanatory. This could be a good way to know that names are appropriate. The easier it is to follow up, the more consistent and mechanical the tagging process will be.

Lastly, have in mind that I also divided the tags into categories which basically speak if the tag is related to the content/material (Content Tags), the type of problem presented (type of problem tags) and the state of the annotation (Management Tags).

ALL TAGS ARE CASE-SENSITIVE. Make sure ALL TEAM MEMBERS USE TAGS under the same conditions. TAGS MUST MATCH EXACTLY AS DECIDED BY THE TEAM: lowercase, UPPERCASE or First letter case or a new tag will be created instead.

Name Tag	Description
Content Tags
Videos	Any embedded video material that is embedded in the book.
Sources / References	Anything related to external material used inside the press book that is being developed considering that references are mandatory for OER content.
Images	Any type of picture
Links	Any type of link such as a navigational anchor inside the same chapter of the book or redirecting to other websites.
Licencing	Every type of content added to a digital format as OER material should be covered under the book’s licence. If some of the content is generating doubts about the coverage of the licence, it should be flagged for future consideration.
Type of Problem Tags
Inconsistencies	All OER material should be consistent. Content with discrepancies of style in design, organization, structure, and proper referencing such as APA style or TAL method. More info about referencing OER’s here
Issues	Problems with things affecting the user experience such as dead links, problematic tables, errors in the display due to size, wrong spacing, placing or distribution.
Management Tags
In progress	Annotations where a team member is actively working on
Done	Annotations already addressed/completed

Why not use an “In Progress Tag”?

The way Pressbooks was designed makes it a little bit more difficult to change a name of a particular tag on a particular comment if you are not the owner or the author of the comment.

If you have a particular comment under a tag such as “In Progress”, and later in the future, you want to change it to Done for one annotation, it would not be possible if you are not the owner or author of the annotation.

If you are the author, is very easy to change the tags, but when working in teams, ONLY the author of the comment will be the one capable to change the tags on that comment. This doesn’t mean that is not possible to reply with other tags and flag things as “done”, but in the end, this will generate annotations flagged as “In process” and “Done” at the same time which is not advisable.

So how to know what’s in progress and what is not?

Everything that is not flagged as “Done” is in progress.

Naming tags with names of team members

I have found that it would not be beneficial to have tags under the names of team members considering that your own username in Hypothesis is already defining what things are being done by you and that searches can be performed for a particular user.

Proper Usage of Tags

A good practice is to use the tags in combination with others. There are two possible scenarios. The first one is for annotations that are “IN PROGRESS” which will not have any management tag. The second one is for annotations that are “DONE” or completed and will use a management tag.

First Scenario – In progress Annotations.

• Content Tags – 1 or more could be used.
• Type of problem Tag – Only one per annotation.
• NO MANAGEMENT TAG if the annotation is IN PROGRESS.

Second Scenario – Done annotations.

• Management Tag. Add Tag “DONE” to annotation.
• Provide details of the solution in the description section for better traceability such as: “Fixed link, Licenced Checked, etc.” Any meaningful input will be more than enough.

Here are some real case scenarios examples:

Scenario	Tags used
A particular image of the content does have a reference or attribution, but the link is not working.	Links, Images, Issues
A particular source is incomplete or not formatted correctly	Sources / References
A particular link of a source is not working. The formatting of the reference is ok.	Links, Sources / References
A particular text box needs to change. Font size is not consistent with other ones	Inconsistencies
The video should be evaluated for possible licencing issues	Videos, Licencing
The image should be evaluated for possible licencing issues	Images, Licencing

The main concept between the examples provided above is to demonstrate that the main problem should be the PRIMARY or FIRST tag and the other relationships to other tags should be SECONDARY tags. Following this structure will make things easy to follow and will make the use of Hypothesis Tools developed by Jon Udell less complicated.

Advanced use of Hypothesis