(IJCNS) International Journal of Computer and Network Security, 11

Vol. 2, No. 4, April 2010

Redevelopment of Graphical User Interface for

IPMS Web Portal
Hao Shi
Victoria University, School of Engineering and Science
Melbourne, Australia
hao.shi@vu.edu.au

course designer to create groups and manage group

Abstract: IPMS, short for Industry Project Management
System, is a web portal for industry project team management.
IPMS is a very useful project managment tool to manage
students, allocate projects, coordinate supervisors and liaise with
industry sponsors. It has speeded up the process and allowed the
stakeholders to focus on their key tasks. However the originally
developed IPMS is no longer working after migrating to a new
server. As a result, the manual management was brought back
which was both times consuming and tedious for both project
students and the course coordinator. This project aims to
upgrade IPMS to PHP5.0 and re-develop the new GUI
(Graphical User Interface) with enhanced system
functionalities. In this paper, first the background information
about IPMS is described. Then the newly developed GUI is
presented and the usability test is conducted on the re-developed
GUI. It is concluded that the newly developed GUI meets the
user requirements and is better than the existing GUI.
Keywords: IPMS, Project Management Systems, GUI
(Graphical User Interface), Industry Project, Web Portal.
1. Introduction
Many final-year projects are offered at tertiary computing
degree programs to provide project students team work and
real world project experience under supervision of external
project sponsor and academic staff [1]. However, managing
software project teams is a complex task [2]. It should have
occupied 20% time of the project coordinator but in the end
it took more than 80% [3]. In order to reduce administrative
load, many project management tools have been produced
[4]. Some tools monitor full cycles of software engineering
projects while others emphases more on aspects of the
management projects [2].
SourceForge is the best known web portal, currently hosts
over one hundred thousand projects and over a million users
[5]. Open source tools such asDokuWiki, Trac, and
Subversion can be integrated to provide a low-cost platform
for student collaboration on team projects [6]. By
consolidating project artifacts in a central location, the wiki
software serves as both a repository for project information
and a means of communication between team members and
course instructors who may be working from different
physical locations. Integrated version control helps students
track changes in their documents and provides a safety net
for recovery of information that has been previously deleted
from project artifacts [6].
Even Moodle or Blackboard, dedicated eLearning tools
[7] have incorporated group management tools which allow
the
activities besides course contents. Unfortunately there is no
“one size fits all” solution in project management [8]. Many
higher education institutions continue to build their own
project management tools as they provide significant
benefits to teaching and learning. More and more project
teams in industry, academia, and the open source
community are increasingly reliant on web-based project
management portals [9].
The market for tools to improve software project
management and software quality management is fast
growing. It has been approved that vendors of software
project and quality management tools can walk the talk by
using quantitative data to manage the development project
and process [10]. Recently, agile software development
methods are popular because software should be developed
in a short period. However, conventional project
management techniques are often not adaptable to such new
development methodologies. A new tool based on the
communication model has been developed for agile software
development [11], which allows to monitor product quality
control and progress control. Some of these tools focus
mainly on project management for teaching and learning [8]
while others have full support for administrative tasks such
as student registration, team formation, project
confirmation, supervisor allocation and document
management [4, 12, 13].
In this paper, it aims to upgrade the existing IPMS and
re-develop a new GUI for IPMS.
2. Background
IPMS (Industry Project Management System) is a “All-In-
One” web portal. It was primarily developed to automate
and streamline management of the final-year Industry
Projects at Faculty of Health, Engineering and Science at
Victoria University. IPMS prototype was initially developed
based on the FDD methodology using Linux-Apache-
MySQL-PHP, (LAMP) three-tier client-server architecture
[Martin] as shown in Figure 1. PHP (Hypertext
Preprocessor) is the program language which generates
dynamic web GUI (graphic user interface). Apache is
employed as a web server running under Linux operating
system while MySQL is database management system for
IPMS web pages and supports CMS (Contents Management
System). LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) is
used for the user authentication [4, 11].
12 (IJCNS) International Journal of Computer and Network Security,
Vol. 2, No. 4, April 2010

Figure 1. System topology [Martin]

Examples of the IPMS major menus are shown in Figure 2

and 3.

Figure 2. Student Menu [4]

Figure 3. Admin Menu [4]

3. Redevelopment of IPMS GUI
In the 1st Semester 2009, one of industry project teams were
assigned the task to upgrade the exiting IPMS and re-
develop its GUI because it was no longer working after PHP
was upgraded from version 4.0 to 5.0 on a new server. The
project team consists of four final-year computer science
students. They aim to maintain existing system functionality
in the new system and improve the user interface and the
logical flow of pages and add possible new functionality
[14]. In the following subsections, the newly developed
Admin menu and Student Menu are presented.
3.1 Top-down Module Design
After the structured system analysis, the top-down design for
IPMS module using Gane and Sarson graphical
specification technique is shown in Figure 4.
3.2 Admin Menu
Once a user is logged in as an admin user, the admin menu
becomes available at the left side. The major change is that
the menus are grouped into major functionality shown in
shown Figure 5.
 (IJCNS) International Journal of Computer and Network Security, 13
Vol. 2, No. 4, April 2010

IPMS Module

Login Email Database Register Web_Content User User_Details Project Team Report Former_Student

Login Logout PHPMyAdmi Update_Web_Conten Team_Report

n t

Add_New Delete Details

Check_Login External Update Team _Document User_Report Project_Report

Figure 4. Top-down Module Design for IPMS [15]

Back to the default home page

Contain general web pages

that are meant for everyone
to see

Contain web pages which

displays Team’s personal
information

Contain the assigned

Team(s) to a supervisor with
their contact details

Figure 6. General Information submenus

Contain forms/documents
used to enable a supervisor
to evaluate Team’s
performance

Logout from the system
Contain forms/documents
used to enable unit
coordinator to able to
modify user, project and
team information.

Figure 5. Newly developed GUI for Admin Menu [15]

3.2.1 General Information Menu
The general information menu consists of six submenus,
namely About Industrial Project, Projects, Supervisors,
Sponsors, Industrial Partners and FAQs as shown in Figure
6.
Figure 7. Administrator Menu
3.2.2 Administrator menu
3.2.3 My Team menu
The Administrator Area contains the key menus such as
My Team menu contains three submenus namely:
Overview Information, Reports, Emails, User
RCM3001, RCM3002 and Assessment, each submenu
Administration, Project Administration, Team
contains several submenus as well as shown in Figure 7.
Administration, Database Access and Content Management
as shown in 7.
14 (IJCNS) International Journal of Computer and Network Security,
Vol. 2, No. 4, April 2010

Q1. Registration/Signup process

Q2. Availability of other students to form a team
Q3. Team formation
Q4. Registration of an available project to a team or
project proposal
Q5. Efficiency from registration to team formation
Q6. Overall experience

The detailed results of the usability test are shown in Figure

11.
Back to the default home page

Contain general web pages

that are meant for everyone
to see

Contain web pages which

displays Team’s personal
information

(a) RCM3001 submenu

Contain the team with their
contact details

Contain forms/documents
used to enable students to
view Team’s performance
criteria
Logout from the system

Figure 9. Student Menu [15]

(b) Assessment submenu Figure 10. My Team submenus

Figure 8. My Team menu

Q1. Regis tration/Signup proces s

3.3 Student Menu 50%

40%
Once a user logins in as a student, the student menu displays
No. of Users

30% Paper-B ased

as shown in Figure 8. NEW GUI
20%

10%

0%
3.2.1 My Team menu Very Hard Hard Neutral Easy Very Easy

This menu contains five submenus, i.e. Team Details,

(a)
Create, Join, Upload Photo and Leave as shown in Figure
Q2. Availability of other students to form a team
10. 50%

40%
No. of Users

4. Use Acceptance Test 30% Paper-B ased

New GUI
20%
Many usability tests were carried out by the project 10%
coordinator during the course of IPMS re-development. 0%

Improvement and changes were made to enhance the GUI. Very Hard Hard Neutral Easy Very Easy

In this paper, the usability test conducted is in the form of (b)

student user experience survey on the new developed GUI
on the same aspects [12]:
 (IJCNS) International Journal of Computer and Network Security, 15
Vol. 2, No. 4, April 2010

Q3. Team formation Design through Risk Analysis”, Proceedings of 43rd ACM
60%
Southeast Conference, pp. 2-300- 2-305, 2005.
50%
[3] G. Jones, “One Solution for Project Management”,
No. of Users

40% Paper-B ased

30% NEW GUI Proceedings of SIGUCCS (The Special Interest Group on
20% University and College Computing Servies) Fall Conference.
10% pp. 65-69, 2001.
0%
Very Hard Hard Neutral Easy Very Easy
[4] H. Shi, “IPMS: A Web Portal for Industry Project Team
Management”, International Journal of Communication, Vol.
(c) 7 No. 4, April 2007, pp. 111-116.
Q4. Re gis tration of an available proje ct to a team or project proposal
[5] Source-Forge, http://sourceforge.net [Accessed: Feb. 12,
50% 2010]
40% [6] E. R. Haley, G. B. Collins, and D. J. Co, "The wonderful
No. of Users

30% P aper-B ased world of wiki benefits students and instructors", IEEE
IP M S P o rtal
20% Potentials, Volume: 27, Issue: 2, pp. 21-26, 2008.
10% [7] Blackboard, http://blackboard.com [Accessed: Feb. 12, 2010]
0% [8] Moodel, Open-source course management system
Very Hard Hard Neutral Easy Very Easy
http://moodle.com [Accessed: Feb. 12, 2010]
(d) [9] A. N. Norita and P. A. Laplante, “ Software Project
Management Tools: Making a Practical Decision Using
Q5. Efficiency from registration to team form ation
60%
AHP”, Proceedings of the 30th Annual IEEE/NASA
50% Software Engineering Workshop, 24-28, 2006.
No. of Users

40% Paper-B ased [10] G. V. Seshagiri and S. Priya, "Walking the Talk: Building
30% NEW GUI
Quality into the Software Quality Management Tool",
20%
10%
Proceedings of the Third International Conference On
0% Quality Software (QSIC), pp. 67 – 74, 2003.
Very Hard Hard Neutral Easy Very Easy [11] N. Hanakawa and K. Okura, "A project management support
tool using communication for agile software development",
(e)
Proceedings of the 11th Asia-Pacific Software Engineering
Q6. Overall experience
Conference (APSEC), pp. 316 - 323, 2004.
70%
60% [12] R. Martin and H. Shi “Design and Implementation of IPMS
Web Portal”, Proceedings of International Conference on
No. of Users

50%
Paper-B ased
40%
30%
NEW GUI Computers and Advanced Technology in Education (CATE),
20% pp. 16-21, 2007.
10% [13] H. Shi, "Reshaping ICT Industry Projects - My Three-Year
0%
Very Hard Hard Neutral Easy Very Easy Experience", Proceedings of AusWIT06 Australian Women
in IT Conference, 4-5 December, Adelaide, Australia, pp.36-
(f) 46, 2006
Figure 11. User experience survey [14] R. El Tabbal, L. H. It, J. Toke and D. Tu, “Redevelopment of
Industry Project Management System”, Final-year Industry
5. Conclusions Project Design Report, School of Engineering and Science,
Victoria University, November 2009.-
IPMS has been upgraded to PHP5.0 after one-year [15] R. El Tabbal, L. H. It, J. Toke and D. Tu, “Redevelopment of
development. The usability test has proved the new Industry Project Management System”, Software Design
developed GUI efficient and user friendly. The new Document and User Manual, School of Engineering and
upgraded IPMS removes tedious manual process and Science, Victoria University, June 2009.
provides smooth management functionalities for students,
supervisors, and coordinator and industry sponsors. It is Author Profile
concluded that the newly developed IPMS meets the user
requirements and is better than the previous version.
Hao Shi obtained her BE in Electronics
Engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong
Acknowledgements University, China and her PhD at
University of Wollongong. She is now an
The author would like to thank the project team, Riad El
Associate Professor and ICT Industry
Tabbal (team leader), Leang Heng It, Jack Toke and Duncan
Project coordinator at School of
Tu and the project supervisor, Associate Professor Xun Yi
Engineering and Science, Victoria
for their contributions in revitalising the IPMS GUI.
University. She has established Industry- Based Learning
program at the School and won a number of Teaching and
References Leaning grants and awards. She is currently managing more
than a dozen of ICT university scholarships with local
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