Project Plan

Project Plan

1. Overview

NEPH (Neighborhood Emergency Preparedness Hub) is a community-oriented disaster preparedness and coordination platform designed to help individuals prepare before emergencies and support each other during crisis situations. The project aims to provide both a mobile and a web-based experience, supported by a shared backend infrastructure.

Our project plan is structured around two major milestones:

• MVP Plan
• Final Milestone Plan

This page serves as the high-level planning document that connects those two milestone plans into a single roadmap for the term.

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2. Planning Approach

The project is organized in two phases:

MVP Phase

The MVP phase focuses on delivering the core working product. The main objective is to implement the essential user flows and demonstrate that the platform can support its primary purpose. This phase is more detailed and task-oriented, since it defines the minimum set of features required for a usable and demo-ready product.

Detailed scope and weekly breakdown are documented in the MVP Plan.

Final Milestone Phase

The final milestone phase builds on the MVP by improving the product in terms of completeness, reliability, usability, and feature depth. This phase is planned at a higher level and reflects the broader direction of the project after the initial working version is complete.

Detailed goals and expected expansion areas are documented in the Final Milestone Plan.

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3. Project Objectives

The overall objectives of the project are:

• Deliver a usable disaster preparedness and coordination platform
• Support essential user flows for account management, profile management, and help coordination
• Provide accessible preparedness information through the web platform
• Establish a technical foundation that can be extended in later iterations
• Demonstrate a realistic end-to-end usage scenario by the end of the term

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4. Milestone Structure

Milestone	Purpose	Planning Style
MVP Milestone	Build the minimum viable product with core functionality	Detailed, feature-focused, and implementation-oriented
Final Milestone	Expand and improve the product beyond the MVP baseline	Higher-level, broader, and refinement-oriented

This structure allows the team to first secure a working core system, then continue with improvements and extensions without overloading the early development phase.

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5. Development Strategy

The team follows an incremental development strategy. Instead of attempting to build the entire system at once, we first focus on the most critical flows and then expand the system in later iterations.

Our general strategy is:

1. Build the project foundation and shared infrastructure
2. Implement core user-facing functionality
3. Integrate the mobile, web, and backend components
4. Stabilize the MVP and prepare a working demonstration
5. Extend the system for the final milestone with additional features and refinements

This approach reduces project risk and helps maintain steady progress throughout the term.

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6. Team and Work Organization

Development is carried out across three main technical areas:

• Backend: API development, business logic, data management, deployment support
• Mobile (Android): primary disaster-time client and core user interaction flows
• Web: preparedness information, account-related flows, and web-based access to the system

In addition to implementation work, the team also maintains documentation, planning artifacts, testing activities, and milestone preparation throughout the term.

Task ownership and progress tracking are managed through GitHub Issues, pull requests, and milestone-based planning.

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7. Workflow Principles

To keep the project manageable and collaborative, the team follows these principles:

• Prioritize core functionality before advanced features
• Develop in small, trackable tasks
• Integrate continuously across frontend, mobile, and backend work
• Use milestone-based planning to keep development aligned with deliverables
• Reserve time for testing, debugging, and documentation before each milestone submission

This helps ensure that the project remains both realistic and deliverable within the available timeline.

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8. Deliverable Logic

The project plan is intentionally divided into two connected planning documents:

• The MVP Plan defines what must be implemented first and how the team reaches a working minimum product.
• The Final Milestone Plan defines how the system is expected to evolve after the MVP baseline is complete.

Because those pages already contain the milestone-specific details, this page does not repeat them in full. Instead, it serves as the umbrella planning document that explains how both milestones fit into one coherent project roadmap.

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9. Expected Outcome

By the end of the term, the team aims to deliver a platform that demonstrates the main value of NEPH: helping people prepare for emergencies and coordinate community support in a structured and accessible way.

The MVP establishes the core system. The final milestone builds on that foundation and moves the project closer to a more complete and polished product.

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