In June 2009, the Graduate Division's technology team brought a coveted honor to the Berkeley campus. They and their creation called GradLink-on-the-Web, or GLOW, received the Larry L. Sautter Golden Award for Innovation in Information Technology.
The Sautter Award is a UC systemwide honor recognizing innovative projects developed by faculty and staff in any department at the ten UC campuses, UCOP, or LBNL.
GLOW is an information system, the campus's gateway to information departments need in order to hire, fund, and advise their graduate students.
Winners: the Graduate Division's GLOW team with the newly acquired
Sautter Award. Their product helps departments serve graduate students
faster and better. Seated, from left: Joe Gallo, Benjamin Darmoni, Judy
Dobry, Betsy Livak, and Bill Clark; standing: Morgan Milligan, Yehonatan
Sella, Dennis Andersen, Moira Pérez, and Andrew Bullen. Dobry and
Livak (holding the plaque) are co-directors of the systems and
technology unit; Pérez, the Graduate Division's chief
administrative officer, helped secure funding and submitted the award
nomination. (Photo: Dick Cortén)
GLOW's beginnings date back to 2006. Since then, the project has streamlined many procedures, eliminating steps that were time-consuming and, as is often the case with manual transfer of information, error-prone. It provides live data, much of which used to be available only in periodic paper reports, viewable on-screen as needed. It speeds and simplifies many complex processes, among them the University Fellowship Competition and the payment of fee remissions to student academic employees.
Application development
How did it get there? The team likens the application development process to running a great kitchen. Its two chefs, systems co-directors Betsy Livak and Judy Dobry, speak as one:
"First, you need good recipe books. The GLOW team has gotten information on lean/agile development from many sources, but the book we kept coming back to is the Poppendiecks' Lean Software Development.
"Second, you need the right ingredients. We've learned that you don't have to remodel your kitchen and throw out its entire contents. GLOW's current J2EE code was actually built by replacing an older Powerbuilder/CORBA/J2EE code base, module by module.
"Bake in your quality," they continue. "Create efficient, readable, and easy-to-modify code. Have written programming standards and base them on industry best practices, such as Sun Java and Sun Javadoc coding standards and design patterns. Use software tools like Checkstyle and Jalopy to assist you.
"No bugs! It's easier to remove bugs in the early stages of programming. Running unit tests can help you do this."
The two point out that having the right tools and ingredients is not everything. "As an organization, you also need to know how to choose your menu. In Graduate Division, we've made great progress because anyone with an idea can propose a GLOW project. Projects are ranked on clearly specified criteria. Two examples: projects with great impact on our constituent populations and improvements to data security would both rank highly on the list. The transparency of the ranking process engenders good will and teamwork."
They continue the cooking metaphor, saying "Sizing your dishes is another important element in an efficient kitchen. We all know what it's like to sit on a committee and hash out a project for years, only to build something that your clients are mildly satisfied with, if that. GLOW projects are done bite-size. They are limited to no more than two screens and must be doable in two months' time."
Final advice from Livak and Dobry: "Just let the cooks run the kitchen and they'll be motivated to innovate. Everyone in our team feels empowered and is an active contributor to all our projects."
More information
As part of the Sautter Award process, Livak and Dobry gave a presentation on how their team used agile/lean processes to produce the GLOW system. The slides from this presentation are available at http://gdnet.berkeley.edu/public/SautterAwardDemo.pdf.
The Berkeley campus NewsCenter posted a web feature on GLOW's Sautter honor: Berkeley's GradLink-on-the-Web wins Sautter Award, UC's top technology honor. It includes quotes from faculty users of GLOW and details of the way GLOW automated an error-prone, time-consuming process involving grad students who work at LBNL.
For questions about GLOW, email