The challenges
One of the primary challenges with this project was having to meet some of the legislated privacy requirements, including the de-identification of students in certain states.
Part of Websilk’s role was to validate the data provided by each state's coordinator for each school and its children. This required the development of many database validation scripts and algorithms to ensure the data was rational, de-duplicated and met mandatory requirements (including valid formats like email address as an example).
As with any project this size, scope is ever changing with each iteration the client views. Although this is quite a normal occurrence in most Agile projects (and almost the point of an Agile workflow), it does not work so well when there is a fixed timeline, budget and minimum set of requirements that are legislated.
Managing expectations and working on a staged release strategy instead, allowed us to find a happy medium between scope change and delivering quality software each time with little to no regression bugs.