Project Proposal

CSC 333 Database Applications

Project Proposal

HOME - Habitat Open Management Engine

Team Members

JimHurne
JonboyCorbin
TomSetliff
DennyDaugherty

Project Liaison

JimHurne

Habitat for Humanity of the Greater Harrisburg Area

Address

PA United Church Center
900 Alrington Ave., Suite 235

e-mail

fsilva@paonline.com

Phone

717-545-7299

Name of Point of Contact

Fred Silva

• Overview of Project and Sponsor Organization*

  Our purpose is to develop a database application for Habitat for Humanity of the Greater Harrisburg Area. The database application will help Harrisburg Habitat track information pertaining to local Habitat homeowners. It will track the mortgages of each homeowner, and will also track other important homeowner information. It is our hope that such a database application will relieve Harrisburg Habitat's office staff much of the tedious labor currently involved with their current system. The database application will also improve the quality, quantity, and usability of homeowner information.

  Harrisburg Habitat for Humanity adds to Habitat For Humanity's primary mission of ridding the world of substandard housing by working towards ridding the city Harrisburg of substandard housing. It is the belief of Habitat for Humanity that everyone in the world deserves a decent place to live. In order to do this, through volunteers,they build houses and sell them at with a low cost interest-free mortgage to people in need. The database application will help Harrisburg Habitat track information about current homeowners, and future homeowners.

  Jim Hurne, the project team liaison, will coordinate with Fred Silva, the key point of contact with Harrisburg Habitat to make sure that the project will meet the needs of Harrisburg Habitat.

• Problem Statement*

  Currently, Harrisburg Habitat uses Quickbooks for it's accounting software. However, Quickbooks does not have the functionality that they need for managing mortgages, and for generating the necessary reports and invoices. Quickbooks is also not easily accessible from multiple computers on the same network. Consequently, the work of tracking mortgages is very labor intensive. Another problem that Harrisburg Habitat has is that after ten or so years, information about various homeowners is ether forgotten, lost, or inaccessible. In addition, the size and complexity of Harrisburg Habitat's paper filing system is increasing, and is expected to become unmanageable in just a few years. Lastly, Harrisburg Habitat currently has no formal system of tracking sweat equity hours.

• Project Objectives*

  The database application will take over the tracking of mortgages. Quickbooks will still be used, but mortgages will be primarily tracked by the database. The database application will ease the amount of manual labor by providing a hassle-free way of generating all necessary mortgage reports and invoices. The database will also track homeowner information, thus making that information much more accessible by allowing access from all office computers, and will cut down on the large paper files that they currently rely on. Finally, the database will provide a formal system to track the sweat equity hours that homeowners put forth.

• Project Scope and Constraints*

  The database application:

  • Will track information about homeowners, mortgages, and homeowner taxes and insurance.
  • Will not track information about volunteers, fund-raising, or other accounting functions.
  • Will generate reports and invoices pertaining to the information in the database.
  • Will not generate any other unrelated reports.
  • Will be accessible from other computers on the future network.
  • Will not be accessible on the internet to unauthorized users.
  • Will be implemented using Open Source Technology.
  • Must be accessible from computers running MS Windows.

• Project Strategy*

We will follow the following strategy. Note that some of this will be hashed out as the project advances.

2/18 - Milestone 1 Finished - Project Proposal
2/19 - Meeting with Fred Silva
2/26 - Meeting with Fred Silva - Review draft Project Plan and Requirements
2/27 - Milestone 2 Finished - Requirements Definition - Updated Project Plan
3/5 - Meeting with Fred Silva - Review Application Prototype
3/12 - Meeting with Fred Silva - Review Milestone 3
3/13 - Milestone 3 Finished - Database Application Analysis
4/8 - Milestone 4 Finished - Database Application Design
4/22 - Milestone 5 Finished - Database Application Implementation
5/6 - Milestone 6 Finished - Application Turnover and Final Presentation

We will deviate slightly from the Milestones and develop static prototypes in order to facilitate determining the software requirements of the system. Since we hope to use JSP and Struts, developing static prototypes will also facilitate in the overall system design.

Following the Database Application Analysis, we will begin some of the implementation, finishing the database documentation before the actual due date. This is so that if we run into problems, we will have time to deal with them.

Each team member will have a role between each milestone. The team roles will be described in detail in the ProjectPlan .

• Budget*

  Harrisburg Habitat is not required to purchase anything for this project. However, they will be purchasing hardware in order to set up a small network in their office. This may include a stand-alone server. In the near future, they will also be upgrading their dialup internet access to DSL. Most of these upgrades will be donated from various sources, and thus do not require a significant amount of money or budgeting.

• Roles*

  Static:

  • Contact Person: JimHurne
  • Architect: JonboyCorbin

  Dynamic:

  • Project Lead: JimHurne
  • Documentation: JonboyCorbin
  • UI Design: TomSetliff
  • Chief Programmer: DennyDaugherty

• Resources*

  • This Wiki
  • Eventually, we will have a source code repository of some sort on cs.messiah.edu (perhaps cvs)

• Logistics*

  • We will discuss project details with Fred Silva over the phone whenever needed. Most contact with Harrisburg Habitat will be over the phone.
  • We will meet periodically with Fred Silva in person in order to get Harrisburg Habitat's input on the development process. The meetings will be no more than an hour in length.
  • The project team at least meet Wednesdays at 11:30am every week. There may be other team meetings when needed.
  • At these meetings, we will call Fred Silva, and discuss things with him, along with all the other meeting things that we will discuss.
  • Most meetings will take place in Kelly A102, the apartment that Jim, Jonboy, and Tom live in.
  • We will also meet as a team with Professor Nejmeh as noted on the course syllabus.

• Project Justification*

  This project is a good project for this team because it has a large enough scope, and would be immensely beneficial to Harrisburg Habitat. After our initial meeting with Harrisburg Habitat, Fred said: "You are going to reinvent the way Habitat runs things." It is our hope that this new invention will be for the better.

Approved by (Project Organization Contact):

Approved by Project Team Members: Yes

Approved by Professor Nejmeh: