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STUDENTS' PROJECTS 2003./2004.

Students' projects 2003./2004.

In the first year, 26 students attended the course (19 from Croatia and 7 from Sweden). They were divided into five teams taking part in the following projects: CVSQL, CVS Reporting, Bluetooth, Chat and Project management. CVSQL and CVS Reporting were connected since the output from the CVSQL team was needed as input for the CVS Reporting team. Therefore the cooperation was necessary not only between the members of the same team but also between the two teams.

CVSQL

Expected outcome of the CVSQL project was to enable access to the CVS repository using the SQL queries from JAVA. Final result of the project enabled access to the CVS repository using not only JDBC but also using simple service and console application. Since this was the largest project in the first year it also had the largest number of participants – seven. Five students were from Croatia and two were from Sweden. Due to the problem with communication on distance the main project was divided into two smaller ones. The larger one was maintained by the students from Croatia, and smaller one was maintained by students from Sweden. Distribution of work was made based on the number of participants in each team. In order to be able to distribute work, all parameters needed for connecting two subprojects into the main project were defined at the beginning of the project. That way, both teams were able to work partially independently. Since it was a problem to establish real face-to-face communication this approach ensured that time needed for direct contact was reduced to the minimum.

CVS Reporting

Expected outcome of the CVS Reporting team was to enable simple and easy way to track and receive progress reports for all projects involved in DSD course. In order to make the project a bit easier, the output from CVSQL project should be used as an input for this project. Therefore this project was not responsible for parsing and retrieving all CVS log files but only for their visualization. This project involved six students, three from each country. Since this was a smaller project, it was not possible to divide it into two smaller projects and the need for communication between two teams was greater than in CVSQL project. Students in this team decided for the outsourcing model so that they would not waste much time for communication. The project leader was responsible for connecting all parts of the software together and all other team members were given smaller projects that were needed for the final product. Since this project was very dependent on another project that was also still in progress, it has additionally aggravated the realization. At the end, the project was successfully finished but mostly due to the exceptional work of some team members.

Chat

The task of the Chat project was to store relevant chat sessions in a way that would enable the chat information to be easily retrieved later. Every member would be able to simply search the complete archive of the team communication. This project involved four students, two from each country. Since the base of this project was communication between team members during debugging and programming, the members of this team established the high level of trust. This project was too small to be divided into smaller ones, but because of high level of communication and trust between all team members all students worked approximately the same amount of time.

Project management

The goal of the Project management project was to enable planning and tracking using the most popular project management techniques today. The idea was to provide the user with a mean to use these methods along with an underlying database that is to contain a complete set of information needed for keeping records and keeping track of resources and project activities. This project involved five students, all from Croatia. Due to very bad judgment of the size of the project they proposed a very complex plan for realization. Additional problem was that during the project some unexpected difficulties occurred that forced the project to fail. This project has shown to all students how important it is to evaluate every member of the team and therefore was of great educational value. This project has been partially finished but that was achieved mainly because of extraordinary effort of all team members in the last week of the project.

Bluetooth

Fifth project in the first year was the implementation of Java Bluetooth stack that enabled user to utilize Bluetooth device. This project involved four students. All students were from Croatia. This was also the only commercial project. It needed hardware for its realization and not only software which was also different from all other projects. At the beginning of the project there were also some minor problems with supply of all necessary hardware parts. The project was successfully completed even with these problems but it also showed to the students the importance of availability of all necessary parts even before the project starts. Therefore this project also had a great educational value.

The main goal of all of these projects was to enable better learning and communication mainly within the DSD course. In the following years all these projects were to be used for better and easier evaluation of projects. Real commercial value of these projects was not significant since most of them had greater educational that commercial value.