Status Report Three

CSC 333 Project Status Report

Project Name: HOME - Habitat Open Management Engine
Team Members and Team Lead: Jim Hurne, Jonathan Corbin, Tom Setliff, Denny Daugherty
Date Report Submitted: March 4th, 2003
Time Period Reporting On: February 26th - March 4th

1. Progress Made

   We have updated the SoftwareRequirementsSpecification and the ProjectPlan. Both are much more mature than they were since the last status report, although we still believe that our SRS is slightly incomplete. We have also decided that we will design the project in such a way that it will be able to be released as an open source application for other habitat affiliates to use and modify.

   Jim has done some research and found out that a commercial product called Habitrack does the same things that our project is attempting to accomplish, however we still think that we should open source the application since the philosophy of Open Source fits much better into the Habitat philosophy, and since many affiliates cannot afford to purchase the Habitrack software.

   Also, the project has gotten an new name, HOME: Habitat Open Management Engine. A good name is one of the keys to surviving in the Open Source community, and we thought that HOME was a much better name than Habitat for Humanity Database Project was.

2. Plans for Upcoming Time Period Until Next Status Report Due

   We will try to put together some low fidelity prototyping of our website. We will then show the Fred at Harrisburg Habitat the prototypes and work through the operations. We are also going to create ER diagrams and an overall model for our database. We will set up our system and begin coding as soon as we have an agreement of the project architecture. We will also finalize the SRS, knowing that we won't be able to make it perfect.

   Jim will be making a post on Partnernet, Habitat for Humanity's web portal and message board in the near future (that is as soon as the SRS is mostly complete ) to get feedback from the general Habitat community on the open source possibilities for an application such as ours.

3. Issues Resolved

   We now have a better understanding of program flow. We also revised many of the pages on the wiki for content and to fix minor mistakes. Both the Project Plan and the SRS are more mature.

4. New Issues to be Addressed

   The SRS is still somewhat incomplete. Also, a product already exists to do what we are developing, and so that may hinder our open source efforts.