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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)

Deployment Website

The team initially developed a prototype website, which was ultimately transferred to the actual server on a beta URL for live deployment. These may be found here as follows:-


Progress Tracker

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

Other Highlights

Task/Function/Features Status Confidence Level Comment
New website design and layout (CSS) Done 1 Shitij Nigam
Members registration (with payPal integration) Done 1 Tomy Jaya
Membership Management (export to csv) Done 1 Tomy Jaya
Advanced Search Done 1 WAI Phyo Kyaw
E-commerce Shopping Cart for merchandise (with payPal integration) Done 1 Aung Kyaw
Automatic newsletter updates Done 1 Tan Eu Jeng
Event Management Updates Done 1 Tan Eu Jeng
Social Media Integration Done 1 Shitij Nigam & Tomy Jaya
News Aggregator In progress 1 WAI Phyo Kyaw, Shitij Nigam, Aung Kyaw; scope addition: display of news using fancy box and Twitter/Map integration
Mobile-friendly version of the site Iteration 7 1 Tan Eu Jeng, Aung Kyaw

Project Challenges

The following is a summary of all issues encountered during the project (dated 25th September 2010):-

Content Coordination Issues
Client’s unexpected absence during planned formal deployment date caused issues in coordinating information on the website

Deployment issues

  • Minor delay in Client’s acceptance and approval of beta deployment caused a delay in actual deployment date on the client’s server
  • Actual remote ftp porting for deployment took more time than expected due to an unexpected rise in the size of the web application to more than 100mb
  • Porting of prototype to actual deployment website required more configuration changes than expected (e.g. database connection changes, social media integration, URL redirection changes etc.)

Issues in implementing unfamiliar API
The team took approximately 3-4 weeks to familiarize themselves with and concurrently implement all of the following APIs for the Aggregator feature:-

  • SimplePie API for aggregating feeds (RSS)
  • Twitter with Bing Maps API integration for better interactivity of the “News aggregator” function
  • Fancybox JQuery Javascript Library for seamless display of news article

Content Porting and Migration
Team took more time than anticipated to manually migrate information from the original website, partially because more content was being perpetually added to the original ONE (SINGAPORE) website during the process as well, creating additional delay in ensuring a quality check on the information being ported.

Feature Drop
Implementation of “Google analytics” as a proposed additional feature was dropped as the present website does not incur enough tragic to allow extensive use and exploitation of analytics. However, this may be reconsidered after complete implementation of the accompanying Social Media campaigns as part of the Social Media integration

Feature Enhancement
The News Aggregator function, presently still in development, was further enhanced with the addition of a Twitter / Bing Maps integration in order to create a greater “pull” factor in the news aggregator function and add elements of geolocation integration in order to provide more relevance to the content.

Project Achievements

To be updated.

Project Management

Project Schedule:

PROJECT SOFTWARE PROCESS – USE CASE DRIVEN ITERATIVE DEVELOPMENT
Our team implemented a use-case driven iterative development. This means that our iterations period are not time-based (e.g. bi-weekly). Instead, we group similar use-cases into one iteration and build on the every iteration to incrementally add use-cases or features to the web application.

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

Metrics & Heuristic Evaluation:

Click to download Complete Bug Metric here.
To view heuristic evaluation results, click here.

Meeting Minutes

Click to download Meeting Minutes.

Risks

  • Live Deployment risk: What if the new web application doesn’t work in the client’s server

Mitigation Strategy: to anticipate any server porting error, deploy a beta version on the client’s web-server first, then configure its DNS to be beta.onesingapore.org without erasing the original website

  • Lack of client interaction risk: What if the intermediary client were to be unavailable?

Mitigation Strategy: Liase with tertiary client contacts. In this case, Mr. Michael Switow from ONE (SINGAPORE) has been replying our queries regarding the website porting when Mr. Meraj Huda, our primary point of contact, was overseas.

  • Misinterpretation of client’s requirements Risk: What if our solutions are misaligned to client’s expectations?

Mitigation Strategy: Show client prototype before going into full deployment.

  • Changing Business Requirements Risk: What if our client’s decide to drop or add functionalities?

Mitigation Strategy: develop using Iterative development process and increase client’s participation (via email as well as face-to-face meeting)

  • Lack of expertise Risk: What if our we are not familiar with the technology to develop the solution?

Mitigation Strategy: Research extensively and learn from a variety of sources, assign specialized member to learn the API in depth (e.g. Wai in SimplePie API and Shitij in FancyBox library)

Mitigated Risks
Though arduous, Wordpress framework can be altered via back-end using PhP to build some of the features and customize most of the solutions in this project. Hence, the risk of “WordPress CMS is a close system which has limitations” is removed.

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