Timeline and Project Phases
This project will be divided into following phases:
- Requirement collection
- System design
- Development
- Testing
- Production
Respective activities and the estimated time required are listed into below table. As some activities can be overlapped, we estimate the project will last for 1 year with buffer included.
| Activity Name | Estimated time |
|---|---|
| Requirements collection | |
| Discussion with stakeholders | 1 month |
| Software requirement specification preparation | 1 month |
| System design | |
| Functional specification document preparation | 1 month |
| Database design | 1 month |
| Interface design | 1 month |
| Development | |
| Front end development | 2 months |
| Backend development | 3 months |
| Server setup | 1 month |
| Testing | |
| SIT | 2 weeks |
| UAT | 1 month |
| Production launch | |
| User manual preparation | 3 days |
| Training | 1 week |
| Production deployment | 1 day |
Cost (Development and Operation)
Cost of this system is divided into capital expense, operational expense and ownership cost.
Capital Expense
Estimating cost of employing student helper by assuming the salary is 80 dollars per hour, work 4 to 8 hours a day and 3 to 5 days a week. On average a student developer should cost 8000 to 12000 a week and we plan to hire 2. That would aggregate to be around 24000 per month.
Operational Expense
Operation expense includes the project manager expense which is estimated to be 40000. Also, spare personal computers are required in the assessment center for students who don’t have mobile device or cannot use the online assessment properly on their mobile devices.
Ownership Cost
For this project we plan to deploy the application in Amazon Web Service to save hardware maintenance cost as well as the technical support salary. We will leverage on AWS’s service to deploy one UAT and one production server, with a relational database instance. Auto-scaling service will be configured such that our system will be able to handle rise in demand while remain low cost in normal days.
The cost of subscribing AWS service as above is estimated to be around 20000 per month with current usage.
We will be subscribing security software for every year as system goes. This helps preventing confidential data such as assessment questions, student’s personal data and assessment scores are compromised. One of the popular security software for business: Bitdefender costs US$260 for 10 devices in 1-year subscription.
Cost Summary
In total, below table summarize the cost associated with the project:
| Cost item | Cost (HKD per month) | Total cost over 1 year |
|---|---|---|
| Capital expense | ||
| Student developer salary | 24000 | 288000 |
| Operational expense | ||
| Project manager salary | 40000 | 480000 |
| Ownership cost | ||
| AWS subscription | 20000 | 240000 |
| Security software | 169 | 2028 |
| Total | 84169 | 1010028 |
| One-time expenditure | ||
| New PC purchase | 100000 | |
| Total | 100000 |