TIRF Online
Date
Fall 2006
Team
The distributed team consisted of five students from Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh) and five students from Singapore Management University (Singapore).
My Role on the Team
Quality Assurance Manager, Developer
The Client
The International Research Foundation for English Language Education (TIRF) is a non-profit organization whose goal is to generate new knowledge about English language teaching and learning internationally. TIRF's research is applied to practical language problems such as:
- What is the best age for English to be taught to a non-native speaker?
- What role does teacher quality play in effective English Language instruction?
- What are the best practices for teaching employees English in the workplace
The Solution
My project team and I built a site that helps TIRF reach its goals of aggregating research, disseminating grant information and soliciting for donations. To meet these objectives we built the system around five core functionalities.
User-Submitted Research
Academics around the world have the ability to upload their research to the TIRF website for for approval. Once their paper is uploaded, the TIRF Board of Directors can review the research online and decide whether or not to publish it. This saved TIRF time and money by eliminating unnecessary paperwork and overhead time required for their paper-based process.
Wiki
TIRF wanted the ability to not only solicit academic research, but also allow users to contribute their ideas on specific topics. The Wiki allows an open forum for users to share knowledge without having to write an entire research paper. Like any Wiki, this is refereed by the TIRF Board of Directors.
Discussion Forums
Users have the ability to discuss general topics having to do with English language education and upcoming TIRF-sponsored events.
Organizational Information
Information about TIRF and its Board of Directors was migrated from their old site to the new one. This also contains information about upcoming conferences and events that TIRF holds.
Donations
TIRF wanted to make it easy for donors to make contributions. The donations page allows users to donate online via PayPal or get in touch with their executive director and talk about other possibilities.
Technologies Used
- PHP, Apache, MySQL
- Joomla! (an open source content management platform for PHP)
- Joomla! Add-On Packages
- DocMan
- MamboWiki
- JoomlaBoard
- JomComment
- JoomlaXplorer
Unique Challenges
- The 12 hour time difference between the Pittsburgh and Singapore teams caused scheduling challenges. Meetings had to be scheduled early in the morning or late at night and differences in the academic calendar meant that the Singapore students started working three weeks before the Pittsburgh students.
- The development methodologies were different between the two teams. While the Pittsburgh team was used to a more Agile development style, the Singapore students were more accustomed to the Waterfall methodology. This was challenging to deal with when the teams first started working together.
- The technical skills were different between the two teams. While the Pittsbugh team was more familiar with Apache, MySQL and PHP (LAMP), the Singapore team was more familiar with Java and MS-SQL. Since the project was ultimately LAMP-based, the Singapore students had to get up to speed on the platform.
- Although open-source software took care of a lot of the "heavy lifting", it can also be a double-edged sword. There were undocumented bugs in some of the packages that we used. Fixing these was challenging because we weren't as familiar with the code as we would have been if we wrote it from scratch. In addition, we had to be careful about modifications we made to be sure that they wouldn't jeapordize the upgrade cycle.
- Open-source software support isn't always sufficient. Some of the open source packages we used had vibrant developer communities and extensive documentation, however, others were less supported.