Introduction

Motivation

Group project and internship are annual activities for master students and last year bachelor students in University of Science and Technology of Hanoi (USTH). With the university’s projected growth, managing them is becoming a complicated yet important task. The management is required for both students and the school staff. From students’ and supervisors’ perspective, there should be a tool that helps manage numerous tasks in their projects. From faculties’ academic assistants’ perspective, a system that helps collect projects’ progress and evaluation is of great importance, since manual input for students’ grade is an exhausting task and can lead to error.

Therefore, a collaborative platform that students and supervisors can use in their project, which also support academic evaluation and report, is needed. This tool should help students manage their projects seamlessly, and academic assistants collect statistical reports quickly.

Background

Project management is a common problem, which is why it is unsurprising that there have been a variety of project management systems. Students and supervisors have already been using some of these systems to manage their tasks. We studied these systems to see how projects are commonly and effectively managed.

Trello, a popular web service for keeping track of tasks, uses Kanban board. A Kanban board consists of several columns, each of which contains some tasks in a certain stage, such as to-do, in progress, in review, and done. User can move a task from a column to another. As this workflow is easy to learn, it is also used by other popular collaborative platforms, such as Jira, Asana, GitHub, or Tuleap.

Some other software, such as GanttProject, ProjectLibre, or Microsoft Project is modeled after another tool: Gantt chart. Gantt chart is a way of using bar chart to visualize the schedule for the project. This method simplifies scheduling independent tasks to be worked on at the same time to save wait time.

Although many of project management systems above are targeting software development projects, The application of Kanban board and Gantt chart as project management tools can benefit any other fields. In fact, using Kanban board in other fields is also known to improve productivity by saving time and aid internal communication [willeke].

As effective and popular as existing project management systems are, they do not support academic evaluation, which is one of our main motivations. Extending existing free software could be an approach to achieve our target. However, the complexity of those systems makes it impractical to study within a short period. Therefore, we started this project to create from scratch an academic-oriented project management system.

Objectives

In this project, the overall aim is to develop a collaboration platform for students and mentors. The resulting system should be able to not only integrate well into their workflows and academic management tasks but also effectively perform on back-end servers often with limited resources and across a wide variety of end-user machines.

Building a Collaboration Platform

At the lowest level, discussion would be facilitated through comment threads, organized into logical tasks. The tasks would be categorized by stages such as to-do, doing and done. These stages would then be visualized as columns in a Kanban board to aid managing and prioritizing tasks.

Developing Utilities for Academic Management

In addition to discussion and job scheduling, the system-to-be would support academic tasks. To mentors and committees, these are grading and giving feedback. To academic assistants, these include (but not limited to) exporting transcripts and statistical reports, and tracking students’ overall progress to provide help if necessary.

Constructing an Applicable Web Application

The system should be implemented as a web application for portability [mikkonen2008]. It should be easy to be adopted by users on different devices network connection quality, whilst being simple enough to be maintained by a few administrators to run on modest hardware.

Last but not least, for long-term maintainability and ethical concerns, such as protecting of digital freedom and promoting independence and cooperation in educational institutions, the system should be made available under a free software license [libredu].

Expected Outcomes

From the beginning, it was foreseeable 1 that a few students would not be able to complete a medium-sized system from requirement engineering to architecture, analysis and design as well as implementation, by working part-time in three months. Rather, we anticipated to finish the following:

  1. Requirements clarification

  2. Concrete system architecture

  3. Initial system design for both functional objectives (Building a Collaboration Platform and Developing Utilities for Academic Management)

  4. Implementation of a subset of the use cases, focusing on Building a Collaboration Platform, while satisfying non-functional requirements to be ready for real-world usage

Report Structure

The report contains following chapters:

  1. Introduction: Introduce the motivation and background of the problem and some related works, and afterwards, define the objective and scope of the project.

  2. Requirements: Specify use cases as well as non-functional requirements.

  3. Methodology: Illustrate the development steps, from technical choices to architecture and system analysis and design.

  4. Results and Discussion: Show what we did in this project and what we learned from it.

  5. Conclusion and Future Work: Summarize the findings and suggest the work that can be done to improve the system.

1

While we were overly ambitious and optimistic, our supervisor was more realistic and taken Hofstadter’s Law into account:

It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law [hofstadter].

willeke

Marian H.H. Willeke, “Agile in Academics: Applying Agile to Instructional Design”. 2011 Agile Conference, p. 246–251, Salt Lake City, UT, 2011. doi: 10.1109/AGILE.2011.17.

mikkonen2008

Tommi Mikkonen and Antero Taivalsaari. “Web Applications—Spaghetti Code for the 21st Century”. 2008 Sixth International Conference on Software Engineering Research, Management and Applications, p. 319–328, Prague, 2008. doi: 10.1109/SERA.2008.16.

libredu

Richard Stallman. “Why Schools Should Exclusively Use Free Software”. Free Software and Education. GNU Project. Retrieved 2021-02-01. https://www.gnu.org/education/edu-schools.html

hofstadter

Douglas Hofstadter. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. 20th anniversary ed., 1999, p. 152. ISBN 0-465-02656-7.