University Service Center

Designed and developed solely by Yuxiang Fu

(Source: https://images.app.goo.gl/tB36itRUvU18vmu3A)

(Background images: https://wallpapercave.com/wp/wp2394204.jpg, https://wallpapercave.com/wp/wp2394333.jpg, https://wallpapercave.com/wp/wp2394208.jpg, https://images.app.goo.gl/gmM4wixSVX1LbkTg8, https://wallpapercave.com/w/wp7167423, https://images.app.goo.gl/KDjafwxifwGpHy1V9)

An application that helps students to select courses and TAs to grade students.

University Service Center always strives to provide a welcoming, professional, and safe environment for all students, parents, alumni, and faculty members. When I first became a freshman at UBC, I felt overwhelmingly stressed to look into and absorb all the information on the website in case I missed something important. However, UBC manages to render the whole process simple and straightforward by utilizing descriptive and comprehensible entries as well as informative structures on the website. From my perspective as a currently enrolled student, I just enjoy the experience of using the websites. Thus, software engineers did an outstanding job on this, and they possess something that I should learn from.

• Why this project is of interest to you?

As for my personal project, it strikes me that it would be fun to figure out the mechanism behind the university service center, and the best way to understand something is to implement it. A wide range of people such as students and TAs can benefit from using my application. They would save a large amount of energy and time if this application is handy. Therefore, it is intriguing to build this project and share it on GitHub.

• What will the application do?

This application aims to mimic only a small portion of the behaviors which UBC Student Service Center exhibits such as registering for courses. In addition, the project is expected to modify and improve some functions provided by UBC Student Service Center. As a UBC student, you may experience the situation that you want to register for a course, but you have not met the prerequisites. That can be frustrating sometimes. In this application, a student who pursues a specific specialization can design his/her course pathways based on currently registered courses instead of checking back and forth for prerequisites of each course. Also, you are able to save these pathways (course selections) according to your career plans. Some gadgets could be further implemented to improve the user experience. If you are identified as a teaching assistant rather than a student, you can grade students by a simple grade calculator. It is possible to create a grading scheme for each of the students in the same class. These functions will make grading effective and efficient since TAs only need to type in the grades for each assignment and exam. All the courses can be easily scaped from the UBC archive by an HTML parser object.

• Who will use it?

This application targets current UBC students and TAs. It can be customized to refine students' experience when selecting optimal courses and TAs' counterparts when grading assignments.

Hopefully, this application will hone my software constructing skills (Java programming).

Phase 1 - User Stories

In the context of this application:

• As a user (student), I want to be able to add multiple courses to a schedule.
• As a user (student), I want to be able to view all the prerequisites of the current course selection.
• As a user (student), I want to be able to delete a course from a schedule.
• As a user (student), I want to be able to view the details of the course and schedule.
• As a user (student), I want to be able to view the grades of the assignments.
• As a user (TA), I want to be able to see an array of students' ID in the given class to protect privacy.
• As a user (TA), I want to add multiple assignments to students and grade them.
• As a user (TA), I want to remove multiple assignments from a student.
• As a user (TA), I want to see the courses that students have registered for.
• As a user (TA/Student), I want to sign up and log in with my name and number.

Phase 2 - User Stories

• As a user (Student), I want to save the courses that I have selected in the schedule to a file.
• As a user (TA), I want to save all the grading status of an assignment to a file.
• As a user (Student/TA), I want to be able to clear the existing users' data.
• As a user (Student/TA), I want to be able to auto-save the existing state when I end the program.
• As a user (Student/TA), I want to load all the users' data to the program automatically when the application starts.

Instructions for Grader

• You can browse all the courses in the database. If you click a course name, you can see the course details accordingly.
• You can generate the first required event by clicking the course name.
• You can generate the second required event by clicking add to my schedule button.
• You can view your schedule by clicking the view schedule button.
• You can locate my visual component by running the main class. There will be a nice background image for the welcome interface.
• If you add a course to your schedule successfully, you will see the information in the panel.
• When you log in or register my application, you will be confirmed by pop-up windows.
• You can save the state of my application by clicking save or save and exit button.
• You can reload the state of my application by reopening my application. All the data will be loaded automatically.

Phase 4: Task 2

• In my Assignment class, the method createAssignment throws checked out a weight bound exception and a negative value exception. Another method gradeAssignment throws checked out grade a bound exception and a negative value exception. They have been thoroughly tested and can be considered as robust design.
• My User interface has been implemented by classes Student and TeachingAssistant. The getters and setters have been overridden. (Type hierarchy)
• Class CourseReader reads a html file and constructs a list of courses. In light of the introduction of a map, I utilize the Map interface (a hashmap) to store all the courses. Also in my StudentPanel, map has been used intensively because I need to search a course by its ID. The courses I get from Class CourseReader is a Hashmap<String, Course>. In addition, I store the data as Hashmap<String, Hashmap<String, Course>> where the first string is a faculty name.

Phase 4: Task 3

• Poor cohesion in UserApp class.

  • Specification: This class fails to conform single responsibility principle because it incorporates all the functionality relating to teaching assistant user interface. This class should only include the functions to save the current state and read it from a JSON file encompassing all the users' information.
  • Change: Extract all the methods contributing to teaching assistant interface and put them in a new class named TeachingAssistantConsole. In this way, UserApp concentrates on a single responsibility, thus increasing the cohesion of this class.

• High coupling in Reader class.

  • Specification: This class has declared too many fields that can be regard as unnecessary. Too many fields cause redundant associations with other class.
  • Change: To improve it, I try to transform some fields into local variables to decrease coupling in this particular class (It is shown in UML diagram below).