STRAWBERRY FIELDS, INC.
WEBSITE PROJECT
Sponsored by: Penn State
Learning Factory & Strawberry Fields, Inc. |
Team
Members: Spencer Call, Derek Holt, Dave Muchi, & John Powers
Faculty Coach: Dr. Dennis Dunn
Course: CSE 430W, Fall 2001
- Strawberry
Fields, Inc. is a State College based, private, non-profit organization
committed to providing quality services for individuals with development
disabilities and mental illness in Centre County
- The
overriding design goal of our project was to produce a system that
Strawberry Fields, Inc. may use for the purposes of information collection,
and distribution that is more effective and efficient than the current
legacy system
- The
current legacy system accomplishes the tasks of information collection and
dissemination through a combination of phone calls, office visits, and
snail-mailings of brochures & pamphlets
- The
overriding design goal naturally led us to a website based implementation
- The Strawberry Fields, Inc. website project includes a wide variety
of stakeholders, including current employees, current clients, prospective
employees, prospective clients, other professionals in the special needs
healthcare field, and families of employees & clients.
Each stakeholder had unique needs, which must be addressed:
- Current
employees and clients shall use the site to communicate news and events
within the corporation, which shall in turn, reduce the large amounts of
paper communication used today
- The
prospective employees and clients shall use the site to obtain information
about the programs and services that Strawberry Fields, Inc. provides.
The prospective employees and clients shall also be able to
communicate with the Human Resources department, and fill out and online job
application from the website. The current employees shall use the website to
access the online training center that is being produced by a separate team
- The
Strawberry Fields website shall serve as a resource for other organizations
within the special needs healthcare field.
Companies similar to Strawberry Fields exist throughout the country,
and the website shall serve as a resource for all
- Families
of employees and clients shall be able to access the website to learn about
the corporation, and the services they provide, so that they may have a
better understanding of what their family members are going through
- After
interviewing the stakeholders, and gaining a concrete understanding of their
needs, and their vision for the website, we created the following list of
functional requirements:
- R1:
The system shall be available via the World Wide Web
- R2:
The system shall provide users with background information about
Strawberry Fields, Inc.
- R3:
The system shall provide users with up to date information regarding
the current activities and the current announcements of Strawberry Fields,
Inc.
- R4:
The system shall allow potential employees to view current job
openings, and fill out an online job application
- R5:
The system shall make online training resources available to users
- R6:
A page on the system shall be able to be updated within 15 minutes
time
- R7:
The system shall take no longer than one minute to download a single
page onto a users browser while using a 33.6Kbps modem
- R8:
The system shall provide users with information relating to the
programs and services provided by Strawberry Fields, Inc.
- The
system that we designed using the rapid prototyping model is very modular,
in that it is composed of five disjoint modules.
We felt that this was an extremely important concept to design around
so that the individual modules may be built, and individually tested prior
to the final integration testing. This
also proves to be a distinct advantage because of the logical and physical
independence that is inherently offered by this type of design.
A change in one module shall not necessitate an overhaul of the
entire system
- Module
1 End User Interface:
The HTML/DHTML/JS software front end shall be available via the WWW,
and shall serve as the outside user interface to the system
- Module
2 Data Transport: The
data transport module written in the PERL scripting language shall transfer
data collected from the online job application to Module 3
- Module
3 Database: Module
3 shall be a Microsoft Access database, which will accept the data from the
PERL script
- Module
4 System Maintenance:
This module shall take the form of an on-site workstation that shall
be used to maintain the website, and query the database
- Module
5 Hardware Support:
The system shall be built on top of an NT server module provided by a
third party vendor
Figure 1: System Block Diagram
Figure 2: User Interface Site-Map
- Our
solution has been implemented, unit tested, and integration tested.
The final product may be viewed at www.sfionline.org.
Additionally, we have included screen captures of a few selected pages below
to help showcase some of the basic functionalities of the system
Figure
3: www.sfionline.org Welcome page.
Moving the mouse over the six choices on the index page actives DHTML code that
creates a description of the link your mouse is positioned over, as demonstrated
above with the 'Training' link
Figure 4: This is an example
of the pages located at the second level of the site hierarchy (Reference: Site
Map; Figure 2.) This particular page lists and describes the services that
Strawberry Fields, Inc. provides to the community
Figure 5: This is another page
in level two of the hierarchy. This specific page lists the current job
opportunities, and provides a link to the online job application
Figure 6: The online job
application sits at level three of the hierarchy. Prospective employees
fill out the form, and hit the 'Submit' button at the bottom of the form.
This action packages the data, and a PERL script transfers the information into
a Microsoft Access database
Figure 7: This is a graphical
representation of the relationships between the tables that define the database
where the information gathered from the online job application is archived and
queried
- For
more information, or to have any questions, comments, or concerns addressed,
please feel free to contact us at:
* This page was last updated on Monday, 3
December 2001 by John Powers