• Aim
• Minimum Requirements
• Objectives
• Planning & Management
  • Schedule

Introduction

Aim

For this project, a web-based booking system suitable for use by the Sports Centre at the University of Leeds will be developed.

The finished system will allow all sports members, to book sessions, view their current booked sessions, and cancel them, if necessary. Sports Centre staff should be allowed to do all of these operations, on behalf of any member, as well as additional features such as reviewing the most popular activities and/or venues, and tracking members who book and do not arrive for their session.

The motivation for this project is partly a personal one -- it can be inconvenient having to physically go to the Sports Centre to book sessions. Having talked to other sports members, this seems to be a view shared by others. The Sports Centre manager also believes it would be a useful system, if it were implemented in a way that was as convenient for the reception staff as the current paper-based system.

Minimum Requirements

• Allow sports members to book squash courts for themselves online, and view/delete their own booked sessions
• Allow sports staff to book/view/delete squash court sessions on behalf of any sports member
• Ensure the system correctly charges sports members for their booked sessions
• Allow sports staff to add new sports members to the system

Objectives

The overall objective is to make a working system allowing sports members to book any venue in the Sports Centre, for any activity permitted in that venue.

In addition to the minimum requirements, there are some possibilities for enhancements to this project:

• Allow any venue to be booked, not just squash courts -- squash courts are the minimum because the Sports Centre manager suggested this would be easier
• Handle group/society/club bookings, handled manually at present by the Sports Centre manager
• Allow customised adverts to users, based on their activities (e.g. a regular squash player might be shown an advert for the squash society)
• Allow staff to monitor bookings that are made and not subsequently used
• Restrict the number of bookings a user may make either for fairness reasons (for example, a single user making excessive bookings for activities and venues that have no cost), or health and safety reasons (for example, use of the sunbeds)

Planning & Management

Schedule

As with any project, some form of planning is essential. The following schedule was created for this project:

Item	Deadline
Complete Research	January 24, 2003
Complete Design	February 14, 2003
Submit table of contents and draft chapter	March 14, 2003
Completion of Progress Meeting	March 21, 2003
Complete Implementation	March 21, 2003
Complete Testing	March 28, 2002
Complete Report	April 18, 2003
Final Report Submitted	May 2, 2003

It was expected that many phases of the project would overlap, and this turned out to be the case. Most significantly, the design, implementation, and testing phases overlapped to a large extent. This was due to many incremental changes being made to the design, in response to new or updated user requirements. Also, all features were tested as they were implemented, rather than being tested in a large batch towards the end of the project.

The dates are a guideline indicating that no more significant work should be scheduled after the deadline. For example, by the implementation deadline, all of the most important features (including the minimum requirements, and ideally much more) should be completed. If time allows, additional small features may be added, but by this stage, testing, evaluation, and writing the final report will take priority over such features.