CST499 Week 3

This week, decent progress was made on my capstone project. As a reminder, I'm in a solo project developing a staff portal for Nyamboyo Technical School, a nonprofit African org. 

What project milestones did you accomplish this week?

Since this week was our first phase of user testing (the core deliverables for the capstone are technically complete), we were able to thoroughly test the portal and applications, identifying several improvements and potential issues that need to be fixed, which is a big win for us. I went ahead and compiled the issues below (grouped by relevant app).

Staff Manager:

• It is preferred to have the 'staff manager' app permission be explicitly assigned and removed to staff users, which would allow them to give certain staff conditional admin privileges. Thus, we need to reconfigure the app to allow the student manager app to be an option in the permissions section for managing staff role users.

Student Manager:

• The wording on the actions should be changed. Right now, 'download template' and 'download report' overlap too heavily in their function. We can actually remove the 'download report' button for the time being, or change it to do what 'download' template currently does and then make 'download template' produce a blank excel file for adding new students. This may require additional research into finding the proper naming conventions for our features on the apps.
• The frontend has an issue with dates not properly displaying. Specifically, the table will display dates that are 1 day ahead of the actual value in the database. This is suspected to be an issue with one of our framework tools that can be patched. It is also unknown if Kenyan staff can see this issue giving their different timezone, so this is important to consider.

Student Health:

• Manual edits on health record entries would be very useful for the health app, this should work similar to the student manager application, with a modal appearing that allows the user to change any of the health entry details for the record (and it should of course automatically execute the health entry backend logic to re calculate BMI/percentile, flags, and notes).
• Additionally, the 'download report' function should work with the table displayed, meaning that if a user filters any column and narrows the data in the table, these entries only should be included in the generated excel file. It is important to note the wording updates that will occur on the student manager application before changing this, to keep the apps consistent (see above for more details).

I began working on these tasks and was able to complete the manual edits on the student health application in addition to UI/UX improvements. I also began working on the frontend date inconsistency, the staff manager change, and the actions wording update, but as I was programming, realized that the portal may more or less work better without the changes I was testing. For instance, in researching the frontend dating issue (a classic timezone bug), it was discovered that patching it would mean that Kenyan staff would now see the date in the US standard rather than their preferred Kenyan standard (day-month-year). Furthermore, it turns out that they should in fact see the correct date on their end since they are ahead of UTC. When it came to the staff manager change, I programmed this too but then realized it defeats the purpose of having separate user staff and admin type roles, so the changes were shelved to a separate branch for our next discussion with the client (along with talking about the date issue). 

What is your plan for next week?

In short, completion of most of the above updates (certainly the wording update) will require another meeting with my client/supervisor (she is doing additional testing right now for this), and it is likely that most of them will be scrapped for the best. I will attempt to set a meeting for later this week and in the meantime get ahead on our next bonus feature, the penpal application. This app will appear similar to the health application but involve far less backend logic (definitely not a complicated CDC health data table). It will be used to track penpal letters between Kenyan students and American students, which cycles monthly (part of NTS' Penpal program). I'm very much looking forward to completing this app and as many more as possible so that the portal can be very feature rich by the time our course concludes.

What challenges, if any, are you currently facing in project development? Do you need instructor assistance? 

Thankfully, no real challenges as of now. Honestly, after going through the hassle that was learning to deploy the portal to Render, I feel well equipped to deal with any future issues entirely independently - but if I get stuck on something for longer than usual, I will be certain to reach out. Thanks!