My name is Paweł Niechoda, and I'm IMPIT student. I'm from Poland. During my live I took part in several software projects. Some of them were small projects, created just by myself. While some other was bigger and refered to my commercial work (I was working as PHP developer for about 15 months), in such case whole team was involved in such project.
So I will describe one PHP project (besides PHP5, I was using EXT library, Doctrine ORM, javascript, html). I worked on it for 5 months, it was a new module, which could be added to any application created by my company. It is OLAP system (OnLine Analytical Processing) - the module is about giving statistical information about system, it obtains information from database and put them in nice table or/and draws charts, module could be possible plugged to any SQL database, it also contained basics authorization mechanism (adding, removing users, several levels of access, groups of access etc). Initial documentation was about 6 pages. On specification worked 3 people, main manager, main company developer and I, as the contractor who is going to implement the system. My work based on existing company framwork, and it was about creating new framework module. I was doing mainly part of coding job, but also there was involved second programmer who created some classes which gave database access interface. Also graphic designer was doing all graphic stuff for which I asked (so layout for example). Requirements were well specified already in the beginning of development. But during development some new (requirements) were added (like possibility for livesearch in input text field in search form). But general idea didn't change, so we didn't have to change rapidly design of the system. System was evaluated by end-user during development phase, it was also good tested, thanks to that we found and fixed some errors. Additional requirement appeared when main company decided to add some log and notification system to the framework, so also to my module, I had to make some changes to implement it. Generally all changes were about adding something new, and didn't influence basic structure of already created system. Described system is still developed by new programmers.
Monday 2 November 2009
Fadhili-My experience in software development projects
My name is Fadhili George Ng’unda from Tumaini University -Iringa University College in Tanzania. I’m an exchange student here in University of Joensuu in Department of computer science and Statistics. I’m in third year of my bachelor degree in Information Technology (IT) and we are 27 in my class in Tanzania.
My university had very old website which built using very old HTML editor software. This website was used mainly by the students and lectures for e-learning and information (communication) between these two groups (lecturers and students). Due to the increasing of enrolled students the system became overloaded and unable to satisfy the users need like surfing and reading material from the university server. There were many cases that when using the website, you can just lost at the middle of pages and can’t go to the next or previous page. Some of the link to other pages and external website were not working and some of them were taking users to the different pages which weren’t meant. Seeking to some information was problem due the bad organization and page layout of the website. The user interface and navigation was unorganized.
Due to these problems, we decided to build the professional website which would solve the entire above problem. With our instructor (Minna Kampurri), who was lecturing Human Computer Interaction (HCI), an optional course, we practiced the material in building university professional website. So, we made different groups with 3-4 people. The first task to each group was to make feasibility study. In this stage, we try to study that website and try to navigate entire pages. The nest stage was data collections, we conducted direct interview to find out how and why teachers and students from different departments were using website, their difficulties in using and how they would like the website to be. We actually interested to know what kind of information these people would like to get from the website. After data collection phase, we go further to the data analysis were we found out that many students were using the school website to access e-materials and get the current information. We also found out that many users were not happy with using the website due to bad layout (links organizations and navigations), and teachers faced the same problem in uploading materials and information due to some non-existing links.
The next stage was to design a prototype for the new university website and take it back to users (students and teachers). We used papers and Microsoft PowerPoint to design different prototypes . At this time, it was the latest days of the last semester and summer holidays were about to start. All people were busy with exams and we didn’t test our prototype. The idea was to continuo with the development of the website in next semester (this semester) by using CMS made-simple html editor. We planned to use waterfall software life cycle model in our project. When I was talking with some of the people in development team, they said to me that the development process has stopped for a while in this semester with no specific reasons, but they might continuo again at any time. Now, there is another website which made by another IT class as their party of project in web design course and it is now used as university website although it is not professional one.
In all above stages, I was fully participating in all activities from feasibility studies to prototype phase. I think wesite design is not typical sofware design, but the idea here was we were using those methods which are used in software development projects.
My university had very old website which built using very old HTML editor software. This website was used mainly by the students and lectures for e-learning and information (communication) between these two groups (lecturers and students). Due to the increasing of enrolled students the system became overloaded and unable to satisfy the users need like surfing and reading material from the university server. There were many cases that when using the website, you can just lost at the middle of pages and can’t go to the next or previous page. Some of the link to other pages and external website were not working and some of them were taking users to the different pages which weren’t meant. Seeking to some information was problem due the bad organization and page layout of the website. The user interface and navigation was unorganized.
Due to these problems, we decided to build the professional website which would solve the entire above problem. With our instructor (Minna Kampurri), who was lecturing Human Computer Interaction (HCI), an optional course, we practiced the material in building university professional website. So, we made different groups with 3-4 people. The first task to each group was to make feasibility study. In this stage, we try to study that website and try to navigate entire pages. The nest stage was data collections, we conducted direct interview to find out how and why teachers and students from different departments were using website, their difficulties in using and how they would like the website to be. We actually interested to know what kind of information these people would like to get from the website. After data collection phase, we go further to the data analysis were we found out that many students were using the school website to access e-materials and get the current information. We also found out that many users were not happy with using the website due to bad layout (links organizations and navigations), and teachers faced the same problem in uploading materials and information due to some non-existing links.
The next stage was to design a prototype for the new university website and take it back to users (students and teachers). We used papers and Microsoft PowerPoint to design different prototypes . At this time, it was the latest days of the last semester and summer holidays were about to start. All people were busy with exams and we didn’t test our prototype. The idea was to continuo with the development of the website in next semester (this semester) by using CMS made-simple html editor. We planned to use waterfall software life cycle model in our project. When I was talking with some of the people in development team, they said to me that the development process has stopped for a while in this semester with no specific reasons, but they might continuo again at any time. Now, there is another website which made by another IT class as their party of project in web design course and it is now used as university website although it is not professional one.
In all above stages, I was fully participating in all activities from feasibility studies to prototype phase. I think wesite design is not typical sofware design, but the idea here was we were using those methods which are used in software development projects.
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