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IS480 Team wiki: 2010T1 Kumbaya

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Team Kumbaya

Members

Faculty Supervisor

Client

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Project Summary (Project Simama)

Progress Tracker

Prototype Website : http://www.palotetote.com/fyp/
Current Stage : 2.3 (refer to #Project Plan)

About the Project

Project Simama

The following provides an overall summary of the project, the client involved, the problem faced by the client, and how our team aims to fill the gap and solve the problem through this project.

The Client ONE (SINGAPORE) is a society dedicated to raising public awareness in taking concrete actions to make poverty history. It is committed to supporting projects across the region linked to the Millennium Development Goals (MDG).

The Problem ONE (SINGAPORE)’s website is its primary marketing tool to achieve its objective of raising public awareness. However, since its inception, the website, primarily due to lack of resources, has been underutilized and under maintained, and has not been borne to its full capacity.

Being one of the major factors in the unsuccessfulness of the website, our project thus aims to solve this problem by up hauling the website into a medium which not only pushes information into the audience, but acts as a medium of pulling in masses and allowing more information dissemination, while concurrently ensuring that its core features are simple to use and easy to maintain.

Identifying the reasons for the problem Further research and interaction with the client in the first phase of our project facilitated the direction of our project by helping us identify the underlying reasons behind the problems faced by ONE (SINGAPORE). The following provide a brief summary of the same:-

  • A lack of seamlessness and content organization

The contents of the website are a prime source for ONE (SINGAPORE) to propagate its content. However, any information contained in the content is scattered throughout the website without specific structure and direction, making it even more difficult for users to navigate through the website and to source information more efficiently. Moreover, broken links on the website make it even more tedious in finding relevant information pertaining to ONE (SINGAPORE)’s vision, goals, projects and events, thus adding to the problem.

  • Broken Functionalities

The core functionalities of the website, such as membership towards ONE (SINGAPORE), the regular newsletter updates sent to subscribers regarding their events, and their online store, are dominant features in providing the majority of interaction to the audience of the website, making them vital to its basic functioning. However, these functionalities are, to a large part, unaccounted for, hard to maintain, or not completely functioning, thus making them a problem core to the project, and the primary requirement demanded by the client.

  • Lack of mobile friendliness

A significant portion of ONE (SINGAPORE) target audience is the youth population of Singapore, which they feel are an apt source of volunteerism and propagation of further awareness towards their cause, whom they feel they can reach better through the mobile medium. This naturally demands a mobile-optimized version of their website, specific to today’s popular handheld/mobile devices prominent amongst the Singaporean youth in their opinion. (e.g. iPhone, Android-based phone, Windows Mobile Phone, and Blackberry).

  • Website’s Paradigm

ONE (SINGAPORE)’s website has employed a traditional paradigm that ‘pushes’ out information rather than ‘pulling’ in people. However, the employment of existing social media tools can be used to tap into a massive audience and generate further awareness to their cause, thus making it one of the most important goals of this project.

Project Targets

The following points highlight the overarching targets of the project

Client-defined Project Targets

  • Awareness Creation

To create a one-stop unique portal to let the people of Singapore know about the ongoings on the issue of poverty as a millennium development goal, in order to provide the general public with a platform to find out more information about what the world did recently, in the last week, and in the last month, to fight poverty.

  • Becoming ‘Glocal’

To be able to present Global issues with a localized flavor as much as possible through the medium of the website

Team-defined Project Targets

  • Creating ease of maintenance

To simplify maintenance of the website while adding additional features and to automate content as much as possible in order to minimize the amount of time and resources spent on keeping the website up to date

  • Developing and utilizing newer mediums of creating awareness

To create an increased awareness amongst the public regarding poverty, measurable by increased web traffic and interaction with the contents of the websites, to be achieved and measured through social media

  • Developing a simplified user interface

To implement a more user-friendly interface for all users, to be achieved primarily through reorganization of its website, its features and its content

  • Developing an interactive, engaging, and live-deployed portal which can improve traffic

To include more features and move the website from a stale editorial-based content to a more interactive and engaging user experience

Project Highlights

The following briefly describes a list of major highlights of the project:-

  • Conflicts arising due to a number of plugins being used

Our team was initially under the impression that registered Wordpress plugins are well-tested and hence will not create integration issues when multiple plugins are used. However, during the development phase of the independent aggregator function (to be described later) on top of the Wordpress shell, the team encountered significant conflicts in running website scripts and functionalities. Moreover, the team took 3-4 weeks to learn the independent APIs necessary for the Aggregator function, causing the 5th and 6th iteration of the project to be significantly delayed. This will be discussed in more detailed later in the “Issues Encountered” section of this report.

  • Unexpected Client Absence

During the week of actual beta-deployment of the website to the client’s server, our point of contact had to travel abroad for an emergency family issue. This happened in week 5, and created delays in actual deployment of the website. The client is expected to be back on 10th of October (Week 9).

  • Changing Requirements from the client

Throughout the course of developing the project, discussion with our clients led to the dropping of some initially proposed functionalities, specifically independent mobile application development and implementation of google analytics, as well as addition of new features to the project, which will be discussed in more detailed later in the “Requirement Changes” section of this report.

Project Requirement Changes The following highlight the high-level changes in the project requirements, and their impact on the project:

Requirement Change Reason Change Source Date Schedule Impact Status
Dropping of Google Analytics functionality Lack of significant traffic which can substantiate analytics results. This means the lack of value addition towards client’s requirements. Client decided to drop 30th Aug Positive N/A
Dropping of dedicated mobile application development Time and resource constraints to learn the development platform and actually building the app Team decided to drop 7th Sep Positive N/A
Addition of Geolocation Integration with Twitter API Added to news aggregator for better interactivity Team decided to add 14th Sep Together with the SimplePie API, this addition of scope has caused 15 days delay in iteration 5 In Progress
Enhancements pertaining to admin’s ease-of-use features Added in order to fulfill requirement changes (e.g. exporting of online user database contents to csv) Client decided to add 2nd Aug Added in iteration 3 and caused no delay Completed

Project Plan

Project Milestones:

Work breakdown Structure with Key Milestones (Iterative Phase Development*) Project plan kumbaya new.JPG

Project Schedule Download:

Download Project Schedule (Excel file with Gantt Chart) HERE
Download Project Schedule (Microsoft Project files with Gantt Chart) Planned and Actual here

Project Management:

Click to download project schedule here.
To view heuristic evaluation results, click here.

Meeting Minutes

Click to download Meeting Minutes.

Assumptions and Risks

  • Assumptions:
    1. All software tools* used in this project are available for free (no cost incurred in software)
    2. Non-functional requirements other than easy maintainability such as extensive security and reliability are not the client’s main concerns.

*However, if the team decides to continue to do the project extension, iPhone SDK is not free. Nonetheless, the team has agreed to buy and share a license.

  • Risks:
    1. Team is new with WordPress CMS and its plugins
    Mitigation step: Development team to train themselves in new platform during summer break (Read up tutorials on WordPress/plugins); Wai and Shitij (who had some experience in WordPress CMS) to tutor the team (pair programming)
    1. Compatibility issues upon CMS version upgrade
    Mitigation step: The team should only use popular plugins which are widely supported by the developers
    1. WordPress CMS is a close system which has limitations
    Mitigation step: read up PHP tutorials so that the team can alter framework via the back-end

Resource and Reference

  • Training on Wordpress CMS Development:'
    1. Wordpress Tutorials(http://www.wp-tutorials.org/)
  • Collaboration/Communication Tools:
    1. Subversion Repository (internal)
    2. Wiki (with supervisors & Client)
  • Software Required:
    1. winscp
    2. MySQL
    3. WampServer
  • Hardware Required:
    1. Windows PCs
  • Gadgets Required (for Mobilization):
    1. 1 x iPhone
    2. 1 x BlackBerry
    3. 1 x Windows Mobile
    4. 1 x Android phone

Learning Outcomes

  • Soft Skills:
    • Learning to learn skills
    • Research techniques
    • Project management and Collaboration skills
    • Communication and Negotiation skills
  • Hard Skills:
    • Wordpress CMS and plugins
    • CSS, Javascript, PHP, Flash, HTML