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Nomads Final Wiki

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Project Progress Summary

Project Status

Resource Management Class Participation Social Integration Wave Protocol / Widget
  • SSO
  • CRUD
  • JQuery Preview and Edit Panel (new)
  • Search Documents OCR (new)
  • Search Documents OCR + filter (new)
  • Auto Folder Mapping Upon SSO (new)
  • Consolidated files view (new)
  • Peer to Peer Sharing (new)
  • Professor View
  • Student View
  • Insert Score
  • View Student as table list for score allocation (new)
  • View forum post made by individual user (new)
  • Fetch Moodle User's Data from Linked in site
  • Update Data fetched into Moodle Database
  • Data synchronization option in Moodle User Profile Page (new)
  • Recommendation and search of Forum topics based on user data fetched from Linked in (new)
  • SSO to Wave server using existing Moodle Account (new)
  • RSS / URL sharing and Forum Updates Widget (new)


Project Highlights:

  • Server Broke down - We were not affected as our team backup the files regularly.
  • Drop Archiving Function - We wanted to use OCR for search (archiving and indexing). After research, we replaced the OCR indexing function with the OCR search capability in Google Docs instead.
  • Technology Change - We switched from OXWALL to Moodle. We did research and find that Moodle suits us more than the other LCMS available.


Project Challenges:

  • Team member's sudden dropout.
  • Switched from Oxwall to Moodle after project acceptance.
    • Decided to switch form Oxwall to Moodle. Despite having to give up what we did previously, our team still choose to switch to Moodle to provide a more suitable platform for our users.
  • Change of scope after midterm.
    • We went through discussions after getting reviews from our presentation's reviewers, UAT users and decided to change the functions of our project.


Project Management

Project Schedule (Plan Vs Actual):

[Project Schedule (Plan Vs Actual)]

Project Metrics:

[Project Metrics]

Technical Complexity:

[Technical_Complexity]

Quality of product

Project Deliverables:

Stage Specification Modules
Project Management Minutes Nomads Minutes
Metrics Bug Metrics Productivity Metrics
Requirements Story Cards Nomads Story cards
Analysis Use case Nomads Use Case
System Sequence Diagram System Sequence Diagram
Business Process Diagram Business Process Diagram
Screen Shots Screen Shots
Design ER Diagram Project ER Diagram
Class Diagram Project Class Diagram
Testing Test plan Test Plan
Handover Manuals User Manual
Code -
Deployment Diagram Nomads_Deployment_Diagram
Final Presentation Final Presentation Slides Final Presentation Slides


Quality:

Architecture

Nomads Story card 3.png


Scalability, Flexibility and Maintainability

In our model, as files are hosted on Google Docs (cloud service), benefits associated with scalability and availability with regard to file management are apparent. Hosting, file exchange and collaborative editing of files by users are handled by Google docs.


Availability

Portal is now available and has been deployed to : [MITB LMS]

Nomads_Deployment_Diagram

Usability and Performance

The results from our latest UAT are:

  • User Interface : 70.22%
  • Google Docs : 75.25%
  • Class Participation : 75.19%
  • LinkedIn: 63.43%
  • Google Wave: 64.45



Deployment:

Portal is now available and has been deployed to : [MITB LMS]

Nomads_Deployment_Diagram

Testing:

Team Nomads Conducted 2 UATs in total.

UAT 1

Date 15/2/2011
VenueSIS Meeting Room 4.4
Number of Users Involved 7 people (1 professor, 4 instructors, 2 TAs)
DurationUAT start: 7pm

First UAT completion: 7.45pm

Last UAT completion: 8pm
Tested On :
  • User Interface
  • Google Doc
    • Enable Google Docs Single Sign-on (SSO)
    • Upload file to share in Google
    • Edit file using Google Docs
    • Preview docs file
    • Download your Google docs file
    • Disable Google Docs Single Sign-on (SSO)
  • Class Participation
    • View , insert and update of class participation score
  • LinkedIn Profile
    • Access your LinkedIn Profile
Results

User Interface : 72.5% Satisfaction
Google Docs : 100% successful for those who tried
Class Participation : 100% successful

LinkedIn: 100% successful



UAT 2

Date 04/04/2011
Venue Offline
Number of Users Involved 9 People (1 Professor, 5 MITB Staff, 3 Students)
Duration 1 Hr 30 Mins (average)
Tested On :
  • User Interface
  • GoogleDocs
    • Single-Sign On (SSO)
    • CRUD documents
    • Search for documents
    • User-friendliness
  • LinkedIn Profile
    • Accuracy of profile
    • Updates from LinkedIn profile
    • Topics Suggestion
    • User-Friendliness
  • Class Participation
    • Accuracy
    • Usefulness
    • Update Score
    • User-Friendliness
  • Google Wave
    • Users invitation
    • View online users
    • Chat
    • Leave conversation
    • User-Friendliness
Results

User Interface : 70.22%
Google Docs : 75.25%
Class Participation : 75.19%
LinkedIn: 63.43%
Google Wave: 64.45


Reflection

Team Reflection:

Understanding Users' Needs
Since there's no real clients, Team Nomads is very grateful that Professor Enoch is willing to help us by giving us valuable feedbacks on our portal.

With the valuable feedbacks, Team Nomads is then able to customize our functionalities according to the users' needs.


Leveraging on Existing Technologies
Initially, we planned to build the learning portal from scratch. However, after our consultation session with our supervisor, Professor Jason, we were advised not to waste time rebuilding something that is already available for us to use. We were told to bring existing technologies together and put them to greater use in our portal.

Thus, Team Nomads leveraged on GoogleDocs and GoogleWave APIs for sharing and collaboration, JPGraph for the display of meaningful participation graphs and also LinkedIn to better understand the student's area of expertise and their interests.


Communication is Important
Cliche but yes, communication is important. Communication meaning understanding each team member's views and opinions. Communication refers to the measures we used to discuss our project (ie email, SMS, MSN, face-to-face) meeting and etc. We once had an experience of forgetting to include one of the team member's email while forwarding the email, causing that member to not know the confirmed timing of our meeting. And this was resolved due to our PM, who often sends Text Messages as a reminder to all. We learned that emails are not as reliable and efficient, and thus whenever anyone sends an email to all, that member will send an SMS as a reminder to remind everyone to check that email. This is to prevent the lost of communication through emails.


Individual Members Reflection:

Isaac Lau
As a Project Manager, I learned how to deal and manage with a number of unforeseen circumstances that happened during the period of our project from the acceptance until our final. However, I still managed to overcome all these with the pillars of support from my team mates.

With the formation of Team Nomads which comprises of members with different skillsets such as business-oriented, programmer, design and management, we learned how to deal the project more effectively by leveraging the distinct viewpoints of individuals and also better allocation of resources for their respective role.

During the period of implementation on our web portal, the complexity level for each function gets more tedious. However, it did not demoralize me, in fact I did more research on each function before the implementation and keep on trying till it works which helped to equip myself better with PHP programming from one who started from scratch.
Lastly, as a project manager, the need to monitor schedule and metrics were not as easy as I thought as there was a period of time that I was unable to do any updating due to the peak period of my projects and mid terms, hence I had to delegated this task to someone else to do it.

My main takeaway for this course is the leadership that I gained from Nomads as well as the time management for the various projects.


Ming Wie
Dealing with integration cost means that we have to balance between function we like to implement and function that can be implemented, taking into considerations other variables like time, impact of function to stakeholders, technical competency/complexities, our workload, etc. From time to time, experimentation still eats into our implementation time, even after proper planning. Need spontaneous mitigation planning to deal with cost of integration and experimentation. For example, our task progress are revised every 3-4 days and rescheduled if necessary. Work aside, i am humbled by this experience, it has been a crazy ride and it's been a pleasure working with my teammates.

Kelvin Goh
In these 14 weeks of FYP project, it has been a great challenge to me. This project is able to sharpen my PHP programming skill when I learn and research new stuffs and applies in our project. Jpgraph technology is the main takeaway that I have in this project. It allows me to have create dynamic graph from different kind of project requirement and it is one of the best and powerful tool which I have learnt through my IS course. Another main takeaway that I have gotten from fyp is time management. Planning of your time is crucial and hence you are able to deliver what is given to you, hence meeting the iteration dateline. Through these 14 weeks of FYP, I am grateful to my members that they have taught me well to manage my time and am able to deliver effectively. This will be a great lesson learnt for me. To ensure that the meeting is effective, we should do our assigned work before we come to meeting and during meeting itself we are able to discuss it. I understand that different people have different working style and it is hard to suit everyone working style. However, if the style do work well and score well then we should follow closely. FYP has groom me to be a more efficient and effective person. It prepares me for the life in SMU and using the right attitude regardless which modules I am taking. Furthermore, I have enjoyed the process of working closely with the team through this 14 weeks. It is the obstacles that we have been through together make us stronger.

Serene Bay
Working with these few capable people for the past few months was definitely rewarding and enjoyable, especially when everyone came from different backgrounds with different skill sets. Accommodating with differences, I would say, was perhaps the most challenging event throughout the entire FYP. Differences ranging from different timetables to different working styles had indeed intangibly forced us to work more harmoniously and efficiently as we headed towards the same goal—good grade for our FYP. If this FYP wasn’t done with them, I believe that the rocky roads that we have walked through would have been even more tedious to complete.

Elaine Tan

I enjoyed my FYP journey with team NOMADS. Despite facing lots of challenges before the start of our project and even during the project, I think we handled the problems well. Our team faced challenges from team member's sudden withdrawal to no replies from initial proposed client which results in changes of plans and functionalities along the way. For every difficulties we face, our team would sit down together for discussions and come up with a plan. Despite all the problems, our team would face them optimistically, and I think this contributes a big portion to our success.

Prof Enoch
"During the second user acceptance test the thought that came to mind was 'hey, this is better than SMUVista and is getting better.' When the test is over, the thought was that 'besides the profs and the students, we should use it for our group work in MITB Office as well.'"