Hi everybody,
We started this summer the analysis and study for a new activity module for Moodle with a set of students. We call it "Project Manager".
We are a french private graduate school of computer sciences, and may use such activity for training our students-engineers to manage formal description of what they do. I am involved in software development methods and software metrics in addition to my initial ITC speciality.
I usually use to write all technical docs in english, but this time, to fasten my students' comprehension, I wrote them in french, I apologise, and will publish translations of the specs as soon as the new course year has started and flies nice.
To give a short overview, we ask our students for making projects (little software developements) and we had no mean to force them to write formal requirements, specifications, and then prepare a task plan. We looked for a very simple tool that could be teached easily, but no too trivial so it would be unusable for small real projects.
We found that the sourceforge toolset for opensource developpers was something close to what we need. We designed a little application that allows :
- managing a tree of requirements/subrequs
- managing a tree of specifications/subspecs
- managing a tree of tasks/subtasks
- managing a list of milestones
- mapping specs over requirements
- mapping tasks over specs
- mapping tasks over milestones
- quantifying achievement indicators
- propagating achievement indicators to calculate features covering indicator
Of course will the manager "groups aware", so that adding a single "project manager" in a course in separate groups mode will instanciate a distinct project space for each declared group.
Till now the four firsts points are to be achieved as a prototype, so that the 4 major data entities are set up within a Moodle Activity template.
Here is the actual (french) entry for specs and workspace :
http://vfedu.eisti.fr/course/view.php?id=37
I swear it will be translated soon.
I will update this forum thread for information about our work.