Culminating Undergraduate Experience (CUE)

The purpose of the CUE project is to apply the skills, techniques, and knowledge I gained from the academic program to real-world working environments. During the CUE project, I worked with a group and external partners to enhance my understanding and application of the academic content, while giving back to the community. I developed significant team skills, written and oral communication skills, along with building client relationships. I applied the fundamentals of object-oriented analysis and design, including CASE tools. Some aspects include requirements determination, feasibility analysis, modeling with Unified Modeling Language (UML), data dictionary construction, data modeling and normalization, user interface requirements specification, information security procedures, and development of problem and design specifications. I also used the system development life cycle to perform user acceptance testing, test planning, design reviews, and change procedures. Then implemented, tested, and installed a working version of an information system. The information system used a web-based architecture. A prototyping approach was taken to develop and test the system iteratively.

My Contributions To The Project

I did a majority of the system design and coding on the project. I began by implementing the systems needed to support the application. I started with a server management platform called cPanel to set up the domain, web server, and email accounts for the project. Our team decided to use a content management system called WordPress to manage the application. Afterwards, I installed a WordPress instance on the web server and began researching WordPress plugins that could provide the needed functionality for our application. Through my research, I was able to find plugins that offered a majority of the functionality needed by our application. However, I still had to create several custom PHP pages to add functionality that I could not get from the available WordPress plugins. These pages consisted of PHP/HTML functions, WordPress API calls, and SQL. lastly, I worked on styling the site using CSS and Bootstrap. I wrote about a thousand lines of CSS to unify the style across the WordPress theme and different plugins.

Project Outcome

Live Demo: https://groupprojects.org