Brown's Graduate School Appointment Management System
Allows the graduate school and the departments to enter and track appointment awards and funding for each graduate student
This project is by far the biggest quagmire I have had to refactor to date. I am the third developer to own this project. Fortunately, I have succeeded at my task and this system is now live.
This is a custom system that sits on top of the vender's student and financial aid products (SunGard's Banner ERP). This actually replaces a prior custom system that also sat on top of the same product. The prior system was limited in features and needed to be expanded to put more control in the hands of the departments versus the graduate office. The prior system, however, was notoriously poorly designed and could not be simply expanded to accommodate the new features. The data from the 3 prior custom tables had to be transformed into 15 new tables to properly normalize it. This difficulty was mostly accomplished by the second project owner. There were flaws in that design, however, that were causing the project to move too slow. Thus, the projected was handed to me, mid-stream, to redesign and rebuild.
It took me three months of analysis and design to bring the project out of design mode and back into development mode. I rebuilt the data model and fixed the data transformations and began work on the business logic and validations as the user interface was handed off to another developer. 81 procedures later (to run validations and to move monetary data to the baseline product) and I am essentially done with the infrastructure and awaiting the UI merge.
The new data model for the heart of the appointment management system. Built in Toad Data Modeler.
The same data model (minus the budget table because it's relationships are shown on another sheet) showing the first level of baseline tables that the new custom tables relate to (Banner contains several hundred tables which all cannot be shown of course).
