Group Project

As you can see, the group project is a very important aspect in determining your grade. Typically, teams consisting of 4 to 6 students will be formed, and suggested topics for the group project will be handed out as the semester progresses. You are free to choose your own topics, as long as the instructor approves each project topic and its scope.

I encourage you to start thinking about

- Who you would like to team up with

- Some candidate topics that you would like to work on

- Team captain (chosen on a volunteer basis with full team consensus)

as soon as possible.

Feel free to discuss any ideas with the instructor at any time.

Project Phases

The project grade (for all teams) is broken up as follows, with percentages:

	Project Phase	% Of total class grade
1	Proposal	2%
2	Logical Model	6%
3	DDL	4%
4	Team Grade	2%
5	PowerPoint Presentation	4%
6	Final Report	6%
7	Demo	6%

Each of these phases is described below.

Project Phase 1: Proposal

As the semester progresses, each team will need to fill up the following table:

Team #	Team Members	Captain	Group Project Description	Team Name
1	Cindy Royal	Cindy Royal	A database for publication citations that students or faculty can use when embarking on large research projects	Good Question
2	Ashvin Dharmavaram Bhogendra Stephen Hall Rajkumar Thottikalai Marshall Gallatin Karthik Jayashankar Sheetal Shidhaye	Ashvin Dharmavaram Bhogendra	A Flexible MRP (Material Resource Planning) System	The Analysts
3	Phil Boyum David Penney David Labuda Steven Schathler Raja Bagchi Xiao qing Yang (Amanda)	Phil Boyum	We will be developing an online storefront to sell Motorcycle Parts. In addition, we will be managing the inventory of the parts.	The Stragglers
4	Jeff Chen Joe Bao Susan Chiang Connie Aphonephanh Jane Avirah	Jane Avirah	A database to organize multimedia files including audio, video, and presentation files	PowerPuffGirls (PpG)
5	David Bacarreza Sasha Dorozhkina Jason Guin Keith Lawler Mac Prible	Jason Guin	Labor system of the 21st Street Housing Cooperative	Coffee is Life
6	Michael Tepper Ann Hoang Peng Lu Martina Cheesman Wes Nelson Michael Racusin	Michael Racusin	A database for a small law firm	The Informers
7	Gilok Choi Alex Chung Nima Farzaneh Aaron Hong Calvin Lai Michael McMains Jeff Pirkey	Jeff Pirkey	We are proposing a point-of-sale application for use in a small business	Team POS

The Project Proposal is a 1-page MS-Word document that highlights:

• Name of team members (along with team captain)
• Team Name
• Project Topic
• Need/Purpose for doing this project
• The audience (i.e. users) of the project who will benefit the most
• At least 5 salient features of this project/system to be built
• Optionally, requirements (as gathered from the users)
• Optionally, assumptions, constraints, and functional dependencies

The instructor will then review this project proposal. This proposal is also the starting point for the Project Report to be submitted at the end of the course.

Project Proposal One-on-One review with the instructor

Each team will get an opportunity to meet with the instructor for ~ 30 minutes. Along with the project proposal, all constraints, assumptions, functional dependencies will be reviewed in order to attempt defining what part of the “real world” this project is going to model. Be prepared to ask as many questions as you can. Also, write down, as many requirements from your users that you think would be pertinent for the project.

Time Slots:

Each team captain needs to send an email to the instructor, signing up for the appropriate timings (on a first come first serve basis)

Slot #	Date	Time	Team Name
1	2003-03-03	10.00am-10.30am	The Analysts
2	2003-03-03	10.30am-11.00am	The Stragglers
3	2003-03-03	12.00pm-12.30pm	PowerPuffGirls
4	2003-03-03	12.30pm-01.00pm	The Informers
5	2003-03-03	01.00pm-01.30pm	Coffee is Life
6	2003-03-03	01.30pm-02.00pm	Team POS
7	2003-03-03	02.00pm-02.30pm	Good Question

NOTE: All meetings will take place in the instructor’s office.

Project Phase 2: Logical Model

This phase of the project will account for 6% of the course. As part of the deliverables, I expect

• Project Report (in MS-Word format)
• ER diagram

The Project Report must include

a) The project proposal that you submitted earlier, with any modifications. This must include things that you are going to deliver as part of this project as well as, things that you are NOT going to deliver as part of this project, and maybe flag them as future enhancements. I.e. Phase II etc. You do want to show that you have thought through some of the issues beyond the project, but in interest of time, you may not be able to achieve those.

b) All functional dependencies. The schema must be in at least 3NF, otherwise, explicit reasons need to be stated as to why your schema is not in 3NF. Preferably, submit functional dependency diagrams similar to lab2.

c) Some description of application interfaces (UI screens etc.)-Not necessarily complete.

d) Some description of Work Flow for the intended audience. (Use cases)-not necessarily complete. Work Flow includes the UI screens, including the order in which a user will navigate through the screens to achieve a certain task. Each such “navigation path” is deemed a use case. E.g. “Search for a book by title on www.amazon.com” is a use case that probably comprises of 3 or 4 UI screens (in some particular order). “Buy a book on www.amazon.com” is another example of a use case.

The ER diagram must include

a) Entities, Relationships (along with appropriate cardinalities), Optional / Mandatory, Weak / Strong entities, Attributes, RI (Referential Integrity) definitions i.e. PK (Primary Key) and FK (Foreign Key) attributes need to be clearly labeled.

No programming language code is required to be submitted; neither is any SQL code required.

Next Steps:

Start thinking of “actions” required on each entity. These actions will dictate your stored procedure and trigger definitions.

Stored Procedures and Triggers are required to implement business rules, constraints, and assumptions.

For the “Physical”, start thinking about data types.

Application Logic.

Distributing above work/Implementation Strategy among team members.

Project Phase 3: DDL

This step consists of submitting all the SQL statements required to

• Create tables
• Create views
• Create referential integrity
• Create indexes
• Create users
• Create privileges
• Create stored procedures
• Create triggers

Any other settings required for transforming the logical model into the physical.

From the above, the required DDL are

• Create tables
• Create referential integrity (PK, FK, etc.)
• Create stored procedures (only the header, and not the SQL statements contained in it).

For example, if your stored procedure looks like

CREATE PROCEDURE titles_sum @TITLE varchar (40) = '%', @SUM money OUTPUT

AS

SELECT 'Title Name' = title

FROM titles

WHERE title LIKE @TITLE

SELECT @SUM = SUM (price)

FROM titles

WHERE title LIKE @TITLE

Then, what you need to submit is

CREATE PROCEDURE titles_sum @TITLE varchar (40) = '%', @SUM money OUTPUT

With some English description of what this procedure is supposed to do.

• Create triggers (only the header, and not the SQL statements contained in it).

The rest of the DDL is optional, but dependent on your project i.e. if your project requires creating users, and privileges, then submit the DDL for doing so.

For the project, any VIEWS and INDEXES will be considered for bonus points.

Project Phase 4: Team Grade

Each group member will be required to grade his or her respective team members (excluding themselves) on the following criteria:

• Participation
• Completion of tasks on time
• Attitude
• Any other comments/mutually agreed upon criteria

These criteria (and any more) will be discussed in the first day of class.

Each member will submit a cumulative score (out of 100) for their respective team members and mail them to me confidentially.

Project Phase 5: PowerPoint Presentation

In the last couple of weeks of the course, there will be PowerPoint presentations by each team. Each team will prepare no more than 5 or 6 slides, and present the topic to the rest of the class in a 10-minute presentation, followed by 5 minutes of Q&A.

Email to the instructor, the electronic copy of the PowerPoint presentation with the following 5/6 slides:

• Title of Project, Team members
• Introduction/Purpose/Need/Functionality (Not all of these need to be included)
• ER Diagram (Logical)
• UI screen shots
• Conclusions/Problems encountered in implementation/Team roles/task distributions (Not all of these need to be included)
• Future Suggestions/Lessons Learned

NOTE: You are free to do more slides, as long as you can do the presentation in 15 minutes.

There will be presentations in this class (15 minutes each), with question/answers. Each team must decide who (all) is/are going to present.

The class will start at 8.30 a.m. promptly.

Attendance is required/mandatory during ALL presentations. If you miss these classes, your whole team will be penalized for some portion of the project.

Each team captain needs to email the instructor as to when his or her team would like to present.

Presentation time slots:

Slot #	Date	Time	Team Name
1	2003-04-21	8.45am	Good Question
2	2003-04-21	9.00am	The Stragglers
3	2003-04-21	9.15am	The Analysts
4	2003-04-21	9.30am	Coffee is Life
5	2003-04-25	8.45am	The Informers
6	2003-04-25	9.00am	Team POS
7	2003-04-25	9.15am	PowerPuffGirls

Project Phase 6: Final Report

Also, on the due date, each team will submit a project report (in electronic, preferably MS-Word for Windows format, and print format) outlining:

• The purpose of the project, the audience
• The team members and their roles
• Assumptions/Constraints/Requirements going into the design phase (see chapters 6, 7, & 8 for guidance)
• Different phases of the database design
• Hardware & Software used to implement the project
• PowerPoint presentation, if any
• Source+SQL+Modelling code, including all the DDL
• Table/View/Procedures/Triggers definitions
• Any other information relevant to running/executing the project on a system

Bound copy of project report must be brought and submitted in class on the due date. In addition, an electronic copy needs to be emailed to the instructor.

Project Phase 7: Demo

In addition to the presentation, the team will provide a live demo in 10 minutes, followed by 5 minutes of Q&A. All demos will take place in the lab.

The instructor and/or the TA at the end of the course will test the project LIVE. During the team demo, all team members of the team giving the demo are required to attend. If you miss this class, your whole team will be penalized for some portion of the project. The attendance of the rest is optional. If you have your demo on laptops, make sure you get it to the lab.

Each team captain needs to email the instructor as to when his or her team would like to give the demo.

Demo time slots:

Slot #	Date	Time	Team Name
1	2003-04-25	10.00am	Good Question
2	2003-04-25	10.15am	Coffee is Life
3	2003-04-25	10.30am	The Analysts
4	2003-04-25	10.45am	The Stragglers
5	2003-04-28	9.00am
6	2003-04-28	9.15am
7	2003-04-28	9.30am
8	2003-04-25	11.00am
9	2003-04-25	11.15am
10	2003-04-25	11.30am
11	2003-04-27	3.00pm	PowerPuffGirls
12	2003-04-27	3.15pm	The Informers
13	2003-04-27	3.30pm	Team POS

Project Grade Calculation

The grade on the project will be determined by

§ Submitted Project Report

§ Team members grading each other

§ Scope/Depth/Features of DBMS etc. of project

§ Design of the project

§ Implementation of the project

§ End of class presentation and LIVE demo

§ Electronic copy of the project

§ Comments in Source+SQL+Modelling code+GUI code

§ Submitted Project Proposal

§ Submitted Logical Model

§ Submitted DDL

Finally,

You must read the following sections from Dr. Debra Richardson’s URL:

http://www.ics.uci.edu/~djr/classes/ics125/project.html#coordination

• Team Work
• Cost and Benefits

Most of what is said in these sections is also applicable for this course.

Suggested Topics for Group Project

(Most of these topics are taken from Reference d)

Design and implement a web-based system to keep track of the exploits of your favorite sports teams in a league. You should store the matches played, the scores in each match, the players in each match and individual player statistics for each match. Summary statistics should be modeled as derived attributes. e.g. UT football team in College football, Dallas Cowboys in NFL. LA Lakers in NBA etc. The web-based system should facilitate enter, update, and viewing of data.

Design and implement a web-based publications listing service. The service should permit entering of information about publications, such as title, authors, year, where the publications appeared, pages, and so forth. Authors should be a separate entity with attributes such as name, institution, department, e-mail, address, and home page. Your application should support multiple views on the same data. For instance, you should provide all publications by a given author (sorted by year, for example), or all publications by authors from a given institution or department. You should also support search by keywords, on the overall database as well as within each of the views. E.g. Go to your respective department and see if they would like to do this project for all publications of this department.

Design and implement a simple electronic marketplace where items can be listed for sale or for purchase under various categories (which should form a hierarchy). You may also wish to support alerting services, whereby a user can register interest in items in a particular category, perhaps with other constraints as well, without publicly advertising his/her interest, and is notified when such an item is listed for sale.

Design and implement a web-based system that permits recording of course performance information-specifically, the marks given to each student in each assignment or exam of a course, and computation of a (weighted) sum of marks to get the total course marks. The number of assignment/exams should not be predefined; that is, more assignments/exams can be added at any time. The system should also support grading, permitting cutoffs to be specified for various grades.

Design and implement a web-based system for managing online multiple-choice tests. You should support distributed contribution of questions (by teaching assistants, for example), editing of questions by whoever is in charge of the course, and creation of tests from the available set of questions. You should also be able to administer tests online, either at a fixed time for all students, or at any time but with a time limit from start to finish (support one or both), and give students feedback on their scores at the end of the allotted time.

Sample Group Project Reports from Previous Semesters

Last Updated: 9/10/2003 11:00:12 AM