Collaboration Server Project
Fall 2007

Software Studio

Revised: 11/17/2011

CSE382-AADS CSE681-SWMAA CSE686-IP CSE687-OOD CSE775-DO CSE776-DP CSE778-AWP CSE784-SWS

CSE784 - Collaboration Server Project Team at Software Qualification Test
Project Manager - Dhaval Travedi (5th from left)
Architect - Sreevatsa Lakshmanan (striped shirt in middle)
Test Manager - Prashanth Vijayaraghavan (1st on left)
Teams and Team Leaders listed below

Collaboration Server Project

The Software Studio projects are always large, complex, distributed systems. Each year we experiment with some interesting way of building these kinds of systems. When appropriate, we may use or adapt some idea from previous projects, but always have some new thing to try.

This year we built a federation of collaboration tools tied together through shared data. That is, no tool was allowed to directly talk to another tool. Instead they have access to persistant state of all the other tools through a data manager. This makes adding a new tool very simple since its affect is seen through changes to the state of the shared data, not by coding a new interface to the new tool. There is a potential downside to this, of course, because the power of shared data can cause chaos if not handled with discipline.

We concluded that as long as we treat the database table structure and types as interfaces - that is, we try very hard to get them right the first time and not change them - then this architecture is very effective. We did have our share of difficulties but the integration process was effective and the system performed flawlessly at Qualification.

All the tools are composed of client parts and server parts that communicate through socket and webservice message-passing channels that provide a message handling core, used by all the tools. They also all use services of a data manager that provides mapping from messages to stored procedure invocations and results back to messages.

The Developers of this system are the students enrolled in CSE784 - Software Studio, during the Fall of 2007. This system was specified, designed, implemented, tested, integrated, and qualified in a period of 9 weeks. The qualification test consisted of the verification of approximately 300 requirements via approximately 100 carefully written test procedures. The system was qualified, in a little more than eight hours, on December 7th, 2007.

Instructor's Comments

This project, like its predecessors, was an outstanding success, due not only to diligent and effective management, but also to the dedicated efforts of all the individual teams, listed below.

I am proud of this class and have enjoyed being part of their experience with the Collaboration Server system.

Project Manager - Dhaval Trivedi
Software Architect - Sreevatsa Lakshmanan
Test Team - Prashanth Vijayaraghavan, Leader
Sunny Gupta (also Comm)
Estepan Meliksetian (also White Board)
Vijay Reddy
Falgun Shah
Team Structure Tool - Abhishek Allen, Leader
Vijay Agarwal
Priyanka Salvi
Work Package Tool - Kimberly Lang, Leader
Aliasgar Gulamhuseinwala
Sagnak Tasilar
Scheduling Tool - Aditya Damani, Leader
Kamarish Shrivastava
Progress Monitor Tool - Abhinav Bose, Leader
Shashank Muthyala
Prashanth Sundararaman
Wiki - Kedar Joshi, Leader
Prudhvi Bongarala
Naresh Salguti
Whiteboard Tool - Aniruddha Gore, Leader
Shrenik Dedhia
Estepan Meliksatian
Communications - Rajesh Thummalapally, Leader
Vipul Dudani
Sunny Gupta
Data Manager - Heidi Salapong, Leader
Vikram Bedekar