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Plug-in Review
The Moodle community website currently provides over six hundred extensions (plug-ins) to the standard Moodle code. NetSpot can provide a review of any third-party extension to ensure stability, security and performance in your environment.
Plug-ins can be developed by anyone within the global Moodle community and as a result, the quality, stability and method of development can vary greatly.
One of the strengths of open source software, like Moodle, is the ease with which it can be customised and extended to suit the specific needs of an organisation. NetSpot helps business owners assess whether these attractive plug-in extensions will impact on upgrades, user interface consistency, performance and security.
Evaluating to Reduce Risk
While Moodle can be used as a stand-alone system it has been purpose-designed to be extensible and to integrate with external systems. This enhances the functionality and content available to educators and learners.
The NetSpot Moodle Plug-in Review process evaluates any potential extension against a set of formal criteria. This approach supports the flexibility of open source software to maximise the potential of any Moodle implementation and avoid the potential pitfalls of poorly developed code.
NetSpot's analysis process covers six key quality measures for open source software, and has been based on accepted research on open source software quality measurement
Security - Will the plug-in introduce any security risks or vulnerabilities into the Moodle site?
Maintainability - Will the plug-in require significant upkeep in the future when an upgrade is required?
Usability - Does the plug-in do what it is meant to do, and does it behave in a way consistent with the rest of Moodle?
Performance -
Will the plug-in potentially cause poor performance in the Moodle site?
Platform -
Is additional software required to make the plug-in work, either at server or client levels?
Activity -
Is the plug-in maintained by a group of developers large enough to minimise the risk of becoming an 'orphan'?
Analysis
The review process is performed by experienced Moodle developers within
NetSpot, and aims to provide a rapid turnaround time for simple plug-ins, while
establishing early if it will require additional analysis and a more significant
investigation.
NetSpot have developed a checklist which pinpoints key areas against each of
the quality measures and rates the plug-in against them. This ensures that all
reviews are done in a consistent way and allows for the plug-in to be compared
to other plug-ins available.
Summary Document
On completion of the review process, NetSpot will consolidate the checklist to
provide a summary on how the plug-in rates against the six key measures and
the likely impact of deploying the plug-in. If it has been established that the
plug-in will require a more significant review, a separate review project will be
discussed.
The NetSpot Moodle Plug-in Review then forms a recommendation as to whether
the plug-in should be used and provides a basis for requesting further refinement
of the plug-in.
Customer Spotlight
The University of Canberra (UC) engaged NetSpot to perform a plug-in review of a
software modification done by technical staff within the University prior to it being
installed on UC's Moodle instance.
This plugin review identified several potential improvements to performance and
maintainability within the modification, as well as suggestions to overcome them.
The use of the formal review process will ultimately provide UC with a more reliable
Moodle platform, as well as reducing a range of other risks that could occur without the involvement of a specialist Moodle Partner like NetSpot.
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