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ApplyTexas team previews June sprint, deploys security fixes and EDI download improvements
Summary
Product manager Ronit Shaham told the ApplyTexas Advisory Committee on May 29 that recent development sprints fixed validation and download limits and added security measures; Sprint 7 is scheduled for June 12 with further validation and UI refinements.
The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board’s ApplyTexas product manager said the team has deployed multiple fixes to the redesigned ApplyTexas portal and is scheduling further updates ahead of the next application cycle.
Ronit Shaham, product manager for ApplyTexas, told the advisory committee on May 29 that Sprint 5 (deployed in April) addressed applicant address validation and added application IDs to post-submission pages, and introduced an initial EDI (electronic data interchange) download capability that has since been updated to remove an earlier 1,000-result limit. Sprint 6 (deployed May 13) added security and validation work, including reCAPTCHA on the password-reset page and fixes to field validation that previously rejected capitalized emails. Shaham said Sprint 7 is scheduled for deployment on June 12 and will refine validation logic in education and testing sections and fix UI inconsistencies.
The sprint work included both applicant- and admin-facing improvements. On the applicant side, Shaham showed a redesigned high-school selection dropdown that displays city and state and limits the list to U.S. schools; and a redesigned place-of-birth control that includes city, state and country but allows manual entry if the desired value is not present. For administrators, Shaham said the team removed the earlier limit on EDI downloads and improved saved-but-not-submitted filtering and permission searches in the counselor/admin suites.
Shaham also previewed an admin-portal enhancement coming in a future sprint that will allow help-desk and admin users to view the application screener questions alongside core questions for submitted records; the change is intended to speed troubleshooting. The team said fixes planned for Sprint 7 include resolving an “optional deadline 3” bug and addressing an issue that left the term dropdown empty when editing majors, essays and scholarship entries.
Ann Marie Scarborough, THECB education-technology program manager, and Shaham reiterated that the development schedule includes Sprint 8 in mid-July and Sprint 9 in late August. Committee members asked about a test environment to practice submitting applications; Shaham said a test environment is on the development backlog and is being scoped but is unlikely to be available immediately for the incoming application cycle.
Committee members said they appreciate the removal of the download limit and the high-school dropdown changes but urged the product team to prioritize a test environment before making changes that affect EDI mappings or live data flows.
Shaham asked committee members to continue submitting change requests through the formal change-request form so product and development teams can triage and schedule work.
The ApplyTexas product team said it will continue releasing sprint notes and hosting “lunch-and-learn” webinars after scheduled maintenance to brief stakeholders on outages, fixes and new features.
