UTA ADVISING – CSE Senior Design

Team Name

Timeline

Summer 2019 – Fall 2019

Students

Tufan Acharya
Maheshwor Raut
Sameer Chaulagain
Nawaraj Bhurtel
Ishor Rijal

Sponsor

UTA CSE Department

Abstract

Our primary mission is to save student’s time by not making them wait outside the advisor’s office for
very long. The students will never have to miss their class or appointment because of our advising system will tell them when to arrive and how much time is left before it’s their time to see the advisor. We will be making the advising process completely online by signing up students online and getting rid of the paper-based sign-up sheet. The students will also be able to choose the advisor who advised them in the past or pick a new advisor every time they make an appointment. The advisor will also have a very
an easy interface where they can see who is coming next and if they are new or someone who was already
advised by them in the past. The advisors will also be able to re-schedule the appointments and change
schedule which can be seen by the students before making an appointment.

Background

Every student needs to see an advisor around 2-3 times during a semester, some might see them more
frequently. Currently, UTA has 39,714 students according to UTA fast fact website. That means the total
number of times students and advisors meet is around 80000. It is very hard to control the number of
students wanting to be advised during the beginning and end of the semester because that is the peak
a time when a student meets an advisor. It is a problem for student to wait a long time for an appointment also problem for advisor to handle all those students because they can’t tell how many more students can be advised on a particular day. Right now the students have to go outside the advisor’s office to signup for a walk-in appointment which is easy when there are few students. But if there are more than 10 students, we do not know how long more it is going to take until it is our time to get in. During that waiting time, the student can complete assignments, study or go out to eat. Therefore to overcome this problem we have come together as a team. Our customer and Sponsor for this project is UTA and we will be delivering this project to our Senior design professor Chris Conly. Team MINTS is a combination of both software engineering students and computer science students and we are interested in a software-based project, so it was our choice and also the reason why the professor wanted us to work on this project.

Project Requirements

The student will sign up using their email address or phone number. Once the account is created they can login to their account for further use.
Advisors as admin will create their own account and login using the information later.
Once the account is created by student one can login to their account and get on line respective to their needs:
If the student need to see Dr. Barasch, one should be able to get onto the queue for her.
If one needs to see faculty advisors, one should be able to get onto the queue for a faculty advisor.
If there is no specification of the advisor, one will get onto the general queue.
When the advisors’ login to their account, they will see the list of the students, who are on queue to
get advised. Advisors will be able to mark the person who is being advised and clear the student after advising them.
There will be answers for some of the frequently asked questions and hyperlinks for the forms like
class drop form, grade forgiveness form, add/swap classes form in printable form. For this, there is no compulsion for logging into their accounts.
The user shall receive notification of estimated time remaining for appointment as they get closer to the queue. This requirement focuses on the tasks to be done after setting an appointment. When there is a large queue the software will estimate the wait time for users so that they do not need to wait outside the advisor’s office. There will also be an added functionality where the user can push themselves in the back of the queue if it’s their time to advise but they are running late because of any reason. Also, this can be done only three times, after pushing back in the queue for three times if they are still not able to make it then the appointment has to be re-scheduled and the user will be sent at the end of the queue.
The system should be very simple and easy to navigate so that no user will experience delay looking for things they want. Every category will be upfront. Dropdown menu will be removed from where ever it is not required. The web app should not open a new tab for each selection made by the user.
The data system shall able to maintain and secure the data that will be collected along the run.
The website shall not use any information from the student that reflects the UTA’s mymav information from the student including UTA Id number, UTA’s mymav email or any such related that could reflect mymav information of the student.
The student shall be able to pick the advisor they want to see if the advisor is available.

System Overview

The system mainly contains four main layers or subsystems. These layers would function highly
individually as well as interact with each other to perform the required functionality for the system. The
communication layer would perform the role of a bridge to connect between the view layer and control
layer, whereas the data layer would be helping to handle the data storage and access. Even though the data layer might be functional in data access, the control layer would be highly administrative in terms of roles and data access processes.