Project management for the 21st century: supporting collaborative design through risk analysis
Proceedings of the 43rd annual Southeast regional conference - Volume 2
Enhancing software projects course work by advanced management
WSEAS Transactions on Information Science and Applications
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The Student Online Project Planning and Tracking System, SOPPTS, is an online systemdesigned and implemented to enhance the communication avenues and the projectplanning/tracking requirements of student projects for the Ball State University (BSU)software engineering classes. This paper presents the design and assessment of this tool.SOPPTS has been designed and field-tested to provide real-time feedback from faculty onstudent project progress, to offer online guidance for project planning and to produceautomated tracking of student projects. The tool assessment included interviews of bothstudents at the undergraduate and graduate level and faculty. The interview was a set ofspecific questions chosen to document each participant's experience and impressions ofutilizing SOPPTS. Data evaluation consisted of compiling the reoccurring themes during theinterview process. The major themes that emerged are the increased efficiency in developing,recording and tracking of student project plans, the visibility and immediate accessibility ofthis information and the improved and timely communication among the student teammembers, faculty and client partners.With the improved access to information and facilitated communication through SOPPTS,the project planning and tracking skills for the software development teams improved.Moreover, the informal aspects of team communication and synergy, factors that can be asimportant as the technical aspects, were enhanced.