CUPHD Water Project

The goal of CUPHD Water project is to build an open source e-infrastructure for water licensing and inspections for health maintenance workers at the Champaign Public Health District (of Illinois), and other public health districts that are interested.

System Purpose

The CUPHD Water project eliminates the need for paper applications for Well and Sewage Permits. Additionally, inspectors are able to review, approve, and inspect submitted applications. The following is a detailed description of the process:

  1. A customer(someone looking to install a new sewage system or well) goes to the CUPHD Water web page and selects the type of permit to apply for.
  2. The customer fills out the appropriate form that is loaded. A customer is not required to fill out all the details before submitting a form. This is to prevent customers from entering false data in the fields that they do not have data for.
  3. If the customer is applying for a sewage permit, then after filling out the application form he/she is taken to the plot diagram applet. The customer then draws a rough picture of the proposed system using the tools provided by the applet.
  4. After the customer has finished submitting the data in the application, it is submitted to the database.
  5. At this point the inspector is ready to review the application. The inspector opens up the CUPHD Water Desktop Application. Here the inspector is able to review all the pending permit applications that are stored in the database.
  6. After the inspector has reviewed all the information in the application he or she is able to either approve or reject the application. If the application is rejected then the customer is notified and asked to correct the information. If the application is approved then the desktop application will automatically generate a permit containing the appropriate information from the application.
  7. After approval the customer now has permission to construct the well or sewage system. When construction is finished the customer is required to notify the inspector.
  8. To perform an inspection the inspector can save the application data locally on his or her laptop. While out in the field the inspector is able to open up the site data and perform an inspection. This data is then saved and uploaded into the database once the inspector gets back to the office.

Specifications

The CUPHD Water Desktop Application was designed and built for use on a Windows XP PC. There are no plans to port the system to any other operating system at this time.

The website portion of the project is built using PHP version 4, HTML, and a Java applet. It is designed for use with any browser which supports the standards associated with these components.

Running the web portion of the project requires a webserver (recommended Apache) with PHP4 support. Data from the website and the desktop application is stored in a MySQL database (version 4.1.11 recommended).

In order to help control the changes that are being made to the source code of the project we are using the CVS version control software provided by sourceforge to manage our developments. The Change Control Summary helps to describe many of the changes that have been through the course of development.

How to get involved with CUPHD Water

If you are interesting in using the CUPHD Water System you will need to do the following:

  1. Download the source files for the web application from the Sourceforge CVS.
  2. Place the files for the applet and web forms in the appropriate directory for your web server.
  3. Run the db_create.bat file to create the database that the application uses.
  4. Either download and compile the source files for the desktop application from the Sourceforge CVS, or download the latest released Installer from the sourceforge release page.
  5. Install the desktop application and alter the config file for your database settings.
  6. Enjoy.

If you would like to improve upon the CUPHD Water System or alter it for use at another location:

  1. Download the source files from the Sourceforge CVS.
  2. Refer to the documentation for the component you wish to change.
  3. Make your changes and rebuild the code for your needs.

Project Analysis

Construction

The following is a breakdown of the construction phase of the project. It is divided into the three iterations that took place. Each iteration begins with an iteration plan where we outline what we would like to accomplish, what the schedule is, and other relevant data. Many of the significant parts of the project also have design documents. This document is used to keep track of requirements and to bring attention to design issues for the component. During the course of the construction phase we held biweekly meetings to discuss the progress we have made and difficulties we have encountered. Also, during construction we would keep track of the metrics that were relevant for that iteration. These are shown in the metrics documents in each section. Finally, at the end of each iteration we have an iteration assessment. In this document we review whether or not the goals of the iteration have been accomplished and what action will be taken. Additionally, we summarize the metrics that have been gathered and we make an analysis based upon that.

Iteration 1 (January 23 - February 11)

Team Meetings:

Customer Meetings: Metrics: Iteration Assessment

Iteration 2 (February 12 - March 29)
Team Meetings: Metrics: Iteration Assessment

Iteration 3 (March 30 - April 20) Team Meetings: Metrics: Iteration Assessment

Testing

To help ensure the quality of our product we believe that everything must be thoroughly tested before being deployed to the customer. Each part of the system has undergone extensive testing and quality assurance. The following shows several of the templates used for testing on the project:

Web Application Desktop Application

CUPHD Quality Assurance Document: This document contains information on how the team tracked the non-functional requirements of the project.

CUPHD Water License Test Plan: This document contains the general testing stategy used during the project.

CUPHD Coding Standards: This document contains the standards used during construction to help produce readable and uniform code throughout the system. This helps to improve quality and reduce bugs.

Note that beginning with the first iteration of the Construction phase, all defects and issues are posted reported on www.Bug-Track.com for the CUPHD Water License project in either the Web Application project or Desktop Application project. During the Elaboration Phase, defects and issues can be found in their individual test cases. During the course of construction we found and fixed many bugs and tracked them using BugTrack. The Bug Summary gives a detailed description of each bug that was reported and then closed.

Transition

The detailed plan for the transition of our system is given in the Transition Plan. We have followed the transition plan closely during the weeks of deployment at CUPHD. The system has been implemented at the CUPHD office, but is not yet being used by the staff. All documentation pertinent to the operation and maintenance of the system has been given to the staff. In addition, we have shown the staff how to operate the system in person, during one of our meetings with them.

The project main page contains all the files necessary to build or install the system. We have mentioned to the members of CUPHD that if they are satisfied with the system and want to share it with other organizations then they should direct them to the project website for more information, and to put their own contributions.

Relevant Transition Stage Documents: