HeaderSIS.jpg

IS480 Team wiki: 2010T1 Kumbaya

From IS480
Jump to navigation Jump to search
Kumbaya.jpg

Team Kumbaya

Members

Faculty Supervisor

Client

One sg logo square.jpg

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:-


Facebook page: http://twitter.com/ONESINGAPORE
Twitter page: http://www.facebook.com/OneSingapore

Progress Tracker

Current Stage : 3.3 (refer to Project Schedule)

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, Google News, Flickr 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 Completed
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
Dropping of Store and Membership subscription feature in mobile version The layout of store in mobile version doesn't integrate well, Paypal transaction on mobile is still uncommon and security issues may exist Team decided to drop 12nd November 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 Done 1 WAI Phyo Kyaw, Shitij Nigam, Aung Kyaw; scope addition: display of news using fancy box and Twitter, Google News, Flickr and Map integration
Mobile-friendly version of the site Done 1 Tan Eu Jeng, Aung Kyaw

Project Challenges

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

  • Accommodating and Supportive to team members
  • Effectively utilize the power of Social Media
  • Implementation of Geolocation greatly enhances the visual interactivity of a website with its users
  • Integration of multiple web api's in order to handle large amounts of information while ensuring non-redundancy in website and server efficiencies, primarily through multiple code-optimization iterations

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 Actual & Planned Project Schedule (Microsoft Project files with Gantt Chart) Here

Metrics & Heuristic Evaluation:

Schedule Metric

Schedule metric is used to track the progress of project and increase the efficiency of schedule planning. A comparison is made between the planned and actual project schedule. From the comparison, the number of days delay/ahead of schedule can be extracted based on iteration. The following graph shows the number of days delay/ahead of schedule.

Kumbaya schedule metric.JPG

Based on the number of days delay/ahead of the schedule, actions will be performed according to the following action plans.

1 - 3 days 4 - 7 days 7 days and above
Delay Extend Meeting time to cover all functionalities Add more days/hours to specific task delayed in project schedule Consider to re-scope project
Gain Keep as buffer time Reduce days/hours to specific task in the project schedule Shift project schedule forward



Bug Metric

Bug metric is used to improve the quality of functionalities. The bug “value” will be tracked after every iteration’s completion. Bug “value” will be assigned according to the severity of the bug according to the table below.

Error Category Severity Example
UI Error 1 Minor CSS alignment issue
Implementation Error 2 CAPTCHA doesn’t appear in the contact form
Logic Error 3 Fatal database connection error when exporting CSV
Porting Error 1 “Permalink” still pointing to prototype server



The following graph shows the tracked bug “value” for each iteration. Kumbaya bug metric.JPG

Based on the bug “value”, specific actions will also be taken according to the following action plan.

Bug Value Action Taken
1 - 3 points Bugs recorded in excel sheet, scheduled for perpetual removal
4 - 8 points A Bug Squashing day will be held at the end of this current iteration.
8 points Project member who reports the bug(s) that hits the 8 pt mark will contact PM to conduct a bug squashing day to eradicate as much bugs possible.

Click to download Complete Bug Metric 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

Project Reflections

Team Reflections And Learning Outcomes

Technical, or ‘hard’ skills

  • PHP/MySQL administration for multiple live deployments

The beta deployment phase of the project was certainly an eye opener for the team in being able to manage actual deployment on the client’s server while constantly maintaining their existing information and content

  • Integration of multiple API

The integration of multiple API in order to be able to create the news aggregator function, while ensuring minimal loading time and minimization of code for the same definitely tested the team’s skills in being able to implement newer, less tested open-source codes on a web application.

Soft Skills

  • Project & Time Management skills

Coping with unexpected project delays
Managing project through hectic school term schedule through prioritization and scheduling

  • Client Collaboration skills

Understanding problem domain, a business of philanthropy
Working with real clients and handling communication issues
Aligning solution to meet client needs

  • Scope Change Management skills

Managing drastic requirement changes

Individual Reflections

Aung Kyaw

Project schedule should have been planned by taking into account of more factors and constraints. If so, the delay in the iteration could be mitigated. Moreover, scope could have been managed well by considering time constraints more accurately.

Shitij Nigam

The Project requirements should have been better defined. The initial planning process wasn’t charted out in an apt manner, making it hard to initially channelize the direction of the project. However, subsequent interactions and feedback with the client, while primarily over email, helped fine-tune the vision, objectives, and goals of our project, something which we can definitely take away from the project.

Wai Phyo Kyaw

It is always better to have chosen a project that you are passionate about. However, in this case, the team had to work extra hard in order to turn an ordinary project into something more than ordinary and something which they were passionate about; however, this brainstorming phase took a lot more time than anticipated, something which definitely needs to be taken into account while managing future projects.

Tan Eu Jeng

Project planning should have been more thorough, and deliverables must always be met to the best of the client’s expectations. As such, while the use of plugins was meant to ease the introduction of new features of the website, other problems such as integration with the core wordpress shell and its subsequent customization and code rewriting caused conflicts to occur rather frequently. Hence, even though some of the applications were tried and tested, but when actually implemented and integrated with each other, should always be carefully tested before actual deployment, a core takeaway for future projects and something which can be kept in mind while working with the emerging and newer forms of web applications, such as Facebook API, Twitter API, Maps, Geolocation etc.

Tomy Jaya

Our team’s face-to-face interaction with client should have been more frequent to ensure proper alignment of our solution to the client’s needs. Unfortunately, client’s busy schedule was a big hindrance to this, and contributed towards creating a slight lack of direction in the project in its earlier phase. However, the News Aggregator” function of our project is definitely a feature which excites me the most. Integration with Twitter/Bing Map makes this feature hip and interactive and perfectly in line with ONE (SINGAPORE)’s goals of being able to reach out to a younger audience in order to create more awareness on poverty-related issues and the role of the people of Singapore.

Project Deliverables

Artifacts


Use Case Diagram

Kumbaya use case.JPG

Use Case Descriptions and Technologies Used

One of our project objectives concerning ease of use was to create an easy administrative dashboard. Our client was already using Wordpress CMS engine for the old website, and one of their requirements was to have our solution built upon the same Wordpress CMS engine so as to have the administrative costs of switching over minimized (the need to learn how to use the dashboard). Therefore, whenever possible, our team implemented available wordpress core function as well as plugins to meet the client’s requirements. In the event that no plugins were able to provide the necessary support, self-coded php modules were extended to the solution and integrated to the main dashboard seamlessly. Here are our use case descriptions and technologies used to achieve the use-case:

  • Login/Logout: Admin and Users Log in/ Log out using username and password.

Technology used: Wordpress default “Users” feature

  • Manage Membership: Manage the members and export members’ information to csv file.

Technology used: Wordpress default “Users” feature, Wordpress “s2member” plugin, and self-coded php module (integrated to main dashboard) to extract Wordpress database data, organize the tables, and export it into csv format.

  • Register: register to as ONE (SINGAPORE) member by paying though PayPal

Technology used: Wordpress “s2member” plugin with heavy PayPal integration customization

Kumbaya social.JPG
  • Manage Social Media Content: Manage the contents to be posted to social media channels via wordpress.

Technologies used: Combination of Wordpress “ShareThis” and “Facebook Like” plugin with minor CSS customization, “NetworkedBlogs” Facebook application to pull blog posts automatically.

  • Post Newsletters: Post the newsletter in wordpress and the posted newsletter will be automatically distributed to subscribers

Technologies used: Wordpress “Newsletter” plugin

  • Post Events: Post the event’s details with geolocation

Technologies used: Wordpress “Events” plugin

  • Manage Webstore: Manage the products, prices, categories and promotions for webstore

Technologies used: Wordpress “Store” plugin with heavy PayPal integration customization

  • Manage News Aggregator: Manage the sources of news to be shown in the news aggregator

Technologies used: self-coded php/mySQL module (integrated to main dashboard) to store/modify news RSS feeds URLs and retrieve them when needed.

  • Check Broken Links: Check the broken links in the website to ensure all the links work

Technologies used: Wordpress “Broken Links Checker” plugin

  • Buy Merchandises: Buy the marchandises sold on webstore with paypal accounts or credit cards

Technologies used: Wordpress “Store” plugin with heavy PayPal integration customization

  • Provide Feedback: Provide feedbacks to admins via customized “Contact Us” form

Technologies used: Wordpress “Contact Form 7” plugin with additional CAPTCHA integration to prevent SPAM

  • Subscribe Newsletter: Subscribe to automatically receive newsletters whenever the newsletters are posted

Technologies used: Wordpress “Newsletter” plugin

  • Search Content: Search for the contents of the site with many filtering options

Technologies used: Combination of Wordpress “Search Everything” and “Advanced Search” “Newsletter” plugin

  • View News Aggregator: View all the aggregated news on a single page with a pop-up box showing the news without having to go to the sources. View flickr Geotag photos, tweets and Google News on a single GoogleMap

Technologies used: Self-coded php-based RSS aggregator (can be repackaged as wordpress plugin for other sites), Flickr, Twitter, Google News integration with GoogleMap, Fancybox JQuery Javascript Library

  • Manage Homepage: Manage the layout of homepage through the WordPress Dashboard

Technologies used: Self-coded php form to manage layout of homepage

  • Share in Social Media Channels: Share and Like interesting posts and pages in Facebook

Technologies used: Facebook API

Mobile Version Screen Shots

Touch-based phones such as Iphone, Android, and Window will display the same mobile interface of website.Belows are the screen shots of Mobile version in Iphone.


Screenshot1 Screenshot2 Screenshot3 Screenshot4
Screenshot5 Screenshot6 Screenshot7 Screenshot8
Screenshot9 Screenshot10 Screenshot11 Screenshot12

Test Plan

The method of testing used in this project is Regression. UAT is conducted according to the test plans which can be downloaded here.

Source Codes

Source codes of all the self-coded features can be downloaded here.

User Manual

In order for client to be able to configure the settings and manage all the features in WordPress, a detailed User Manual is provided as a reference.
The User Manual can be downloaded here.

Artifact Quality

Heuristic Evaluation

Heuristic evaluation is conducted since the nature of the project is user dependent. So, the feedbacks of users on design of the website will be absolutely useful for the improvement of the project.
To download heuristic evaluation results, click here.