Development work coordination and conflict resolution

Hi all,

There’s a lot here across a bunch of initiatives and I don’t have 100% context on them all, so just to repeat it back to make sure I’m parsing all this correctly:

My understanding is that we want to replace the Open Assessments tab on the instructor dashboard with a micro-frontend/modern approach. We expect that the instructor dashboard will be re-written at some point soon, so it stands to reason we’d want to have this tab available in that MFE. That said we also need to ensure the updated tab is available in the LMS for backwards compatibility. This backwards compatibility is especially necessary since we lack a well-defined deployment story for MFEs in Open edX.

We’ve painted ourselves into a bit of a corner. I’m not sure of the implications of trying to embed an MFE in an existing LMS page, especially in terms of its build process/EcmaScript versions, etc. We can certainly do - temporarily at least - what @xitij2000 mentions below around making it npm package, but it might be a bit difficult. We haven’t tried embedding some of our modern code into the LMS in that way. Nor is working out the details of that hybrid build process very rewarding, since we expect to deprecate the LMS pages anyway.

I think creating a new repository for this is the right path forward, certainly in the short term. With that new repository, we can publish the contents as an npm package for consumption in the MFE instructor dashboard when it’s ready, and it also gives us some options for how we embed it in the existing experience, if we decide we need to do that. @marcotuts, I’m curious on your take on supporting this new work in the old experience, and how that dovetails with MFE deployments for Open edX. I don’t have an answer around the deployments, much to my chagrin.

If we say 1) yes we need to support it in the old instructor dash, and 2) no we don’t yet have an MFE deployment story for Open edX, then we’re going to have to do some throw-away work around how we actually embed this thing.

The question about whether it gets merged into the instructor dash MFE down the line is something I think we can defer for a bit - if we think it’s a plugin, like so many other things, then it gets caught up in that discussion.

-David