Executive Summary
At the University of Victoria (UVic), course registration is a difficult and stressful process
for students. Although registration is somewhat straightforward for those individuals that
manage to follow their curriculum throughout their degree, it can become an enormous
headache for students who get behind in their courses due to illness, poor grades, or
other reasons. The web applications provided by the University and third parties for
registration have a number of problems that will be solved by the Graduate! Application,
developed by Puzzle.
There is a website developed by a past student at UVic called ScheduleCourses.com
which serves as a significant improvement to the University provided site. It allows
students to select a list of courses, and then shift the course times selected around in
order to make an ideal schedule. It provides a dynamic visualisation of your timetable
which is very helpful for mitigating conflicting course times.
The most significant issue with ScheduleCourses.com is that there is no simple way to
view how your selection of courses in a particular semester will affect your final goal of
completing your degree program. Often, students will fail to register in a prerequisite
during a particular term. This will cause them to be unable to take required courses in
the future, putting them further behind in their degree. Similarly, courses are often
offered in specific terms, and an unaware student may need to wait a year to take a
particular course. Graduate! will take into account a user’s program requirements and
provide a means of visualizing how their selected registration will affect their final
graduation date, and future schedule requirements. The Graduate! scheduling system
will not only consider the student’s program requirements and course scheduling
constraints. It will taken into account a user’s personal scheduling preferences as well.
This is a fairly large project which will require a lot of data entry regarding various
program requirements at UVic. As such, Puzzle will develop a proof of concept that
shows how Graduate! will work with the Software Engineering program at UVic. If this
concept is satisfactory, it will then be possible to move forward with the other programs
offered at the school. This document describes the user interaction features, conceptual
design, technical design, management plan, and testing plan that will be employed by
Puzzle when developing the Graduate! application.