1. Overview

The SPE CMS project involves the development of a web application to be used by clients, student teams, and lecturers to manage the projects as part of the Software Product Engineering (SPE) unit. The client for this project is the University of Bristol, and the contact points representing the institution are Richard Grafton and Beth Cotterell, creative teaching technologist within SCEEM.

Currently, the clients approach the lecturers via https://www.cs.bris.ac.uk/SPE/ and submit their project proposals via Google docs. Afterwards, students select preferences via a Google spreadsheet which is to be used later on for project allocation. Meanwhile, the lecturers manually coordinate all these different stages in order to run the unit. The problems with this approach are maintenance difficulty, inefficiency, and vulnerability to errors.

Our solution to these issues is developing a unit website that integrates all the different aspects of the unit under one domain. It will be used by multiple parties for various tasks, so it will feature different user experiences for each user while trying not to compromise on consistency, such as general UI design.