Advising Webapp Project

The Setup

My senior capstone class was tasked with developing, as a team, a 'student advisement' web app to replace the university's traditional pen-and-paper advisement process.

The Plan

During the design and requirements gathering phase of the project, I was selected as a team leader. Our team scheduled interviews with advisors to discover what features they'd like to see most. This information ultimately was expanded into a design document full of UI designs and use case descriptions. When the class began to move into the app's active development phase, a friend and I were tasked as database administrators. We rapidly prototyped the database using a SQL Diagram tool called Sea Quail, which allows a user to export a diagram as a CREATE/INSERT script (which would eventually end up over 3000 lines long). This method was arguably much more time-effective than hand-coding the script.

As the project continued, we continued to maintain the database and expand it according to the needs of other teams. We also developed several of the PHP user models for CodeIgniter's framework. In the final phase of the project, we performed integration testing of the other team's features as everything was consolidated, ensuring a working final product. I also helped translate a peer's Python script into PHP. When the final class presentation was given to the CSC, I described the database's development process and table relationships. My slides can be downloaded here.

Check out the images below for the final database diagram, UI designs (by me), and the final use case diagram.