CTEC3911 Mobile Application Development Assignment Sample

Introduction of : Survey App For Android Users

The Student Survey Mobile Application is intended to easily capture feedback from the students of De Montfort University on their modules. The current goal of this application is to provide a simple and more effective way of dealing with the surveys by both the students and the administration. This way, the university wants to get valuable feedback from students concerning the specific aspects of their courses, as well as the courses delivered by the learning institution, in general. The project requirements are articulated in detail, which indicates that new user roles for students and administrators have to be created. Registrations, logins, and surveys are tasks of the students where each survey contains ten multiple-choice questions on the Likert scale. Administrators can create, post, and maintain the survey forms along with processing the accumulated data through statistical wizards. The application also makes a good practice of storing all results in a SQLite database with the worst practices observed in database management avoided.

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Analysis and Design

Functional Requirements

The functional requirement that has been proposed to make the Student Survey Mobile Application effective and easy to use includes the following. The functional requirements of the app are that the students should be able to create accounts, log in and see the available surveys. One survey consists of ten questions in which participants' answers are recorded using a Likert scale in multiple choice (Tiun et al., 2021). The different surveys must be completed once by every student and all the questions in each survey have to be responded to before submitting the survey. Administrators can have the power to create pages, and posts and even edit or delete the surveys, and develop the onset and expiration date of the survey, in addition; they can view survey takers' demographics. Also, the app needs to incorporate the survey answers' graphical representation, and all the app data must be securely saved in the SQLite database.

Use Case Descriptions and Diagrams

The primary use cases for the Student Survey Mobile Application are centered around the two main user roles: its faculty and staff, especially students and administrators.

1. Student Use Cases:
   • Register: Students register with a username/password of their choice.
   • Log In: The users are the students who enter the application with unique login details.
   • View Surveys: Students are displayed all the available surveys.
   • Participate in Survey: All the questions in a survey are responded to by students.
2. Administrator Use Cases:
   • Create Survey: Admins create questions and new surveys.
   • Publish Survey: Admins control the duration of the survey by setting up its availability periods from and to dates included.
   • Update Survey: The survey details can be changed and the end date can also be further provided.
   • View Statistics: Admins track the number of participants and the results which can be presented in the form of tables or graphs.

Use Case Diagram

The Student Survey Mobile Application shown as the use case diagram below is designed for two main user roles, namely students and administrators, and it outlines the most important functionality of the application. The functionalities include, students registering to be a member and being able to log in to the system to be able to view the available surveys and pass through all the questions in the survey (Modi et al., 2021). Administrators, for their part, have the permitted controls which include the ability to create new surveys, make the survey active and/or passive by fixing the start and end dates of the survey, modify the details of the surveys, and view the statistical information regarding the survey participation and the survey results. These interactions are well summed up in the diagram where we have a clear delineation between the features that are inherent to the student usage and those that are in the administrator's domain.

Figure 1: Use Case Diagram

(Source: Self-created)

Class Diagram

Figure 2: Class Diagram

(Source: Self-created)

The Student Survey Mobile Application Class Diagram entails the main basic entities and how they are related. The User class is the fundamental class and derived classes include Student and Admin classes (Almazroi et al., 2021). Thus, the students will be able to register, log in, view surveys and complete them; whereas, the admins can create, modify, publish surveys and view the survey statistics. The Survey class maintains a collection of Question objects which is related to several Answer objects. The PublishedSurvey class contains the survey's active dates, while the StudentSurveyResponse class deals with the responses of students, associating them with certain questions and answers to those questions. This structure also helps in making the execution and management of the applications optimal by establishing a clear manner of arrangement of functionalities and data in an ever-efficient manner.

User Interface Design

The layout and design of all features available in the Student Survey Mobile Application are quite self-explanatory. The users engage with the application in answering survey questions that are aligned with a Likert scale to be user-friendly and effective in data sample collection. Surveys can be created, edited and viewed and the user stats and survey details can also be edited or viewed by the administrators (Johnson, 2020). Statistical data is displayed in the form of the pie chart and the bar chart which are informative graphical representations that may change in response to the survey. This particular design benefits the students and the administrators by making it easier for them to differentiate and locate information.

Figure 3: Survey App User Interface

(Source: Self-created)

Database Design

Database Tables

The database for the Student Survey Mobile Application provides and organizes the survey, as well as the users' data and responses. The "User" table keeps the user name and password information and also makes a differentiation between student and administrator users. The "Student" and "Admin" tables are added to the existing User table to add role peculiarities to it. The metadata about every survey and its titles, as well as the periods it is active, are stored in the "Survey" table (Gaffney et al., 2021). It is worth mentioning that the "Question" table has been created to store each survey question individually, yet being connected to the "Survey" table. The "Answer" table contains potential replies to any question of the survey. The "PublishedSurvey" table oversees survey availability through ties to the start and end dates. Last is the "StudentSurveyResponse" table which stores all the responses of the student to each question in the survey with related tables for students and surveys while questions are in the related survey table (Pawlaszczyk, 2022). This elaborated structure helps in maintaining the quality of data and is suitable to the primary functions of the application.

Entity-Relationship Diagram

The ERD represents the connection between the tables in the proposed Student Survey Mobile Application database. The “User” can be inherited with both entities “Student” and Admin since they are connected. The survey entity relates to the question entity in the sense that every survey involves several questions. Every “Question” entity has affiliations with several “Answer” entities which show the potential answers to the question. The “PublishedSurvey” entity associates surveys with the dates of their activity. The relationship between all of them is established by the “StudentSurveyResponse” entity that is in the middle of the relationship and connects students, published surveys, questions, and answers. This diagram focuses on the relations within the database to show how information is connected for the app to work as planned (Sabou et al., 2020).

Figure 4: ER Diagram

(Source: Self-created)

Software Architectural Patterns

The Mobile Application for Student Survey uses the well-understood Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture which separates concerns for better maintainability. In this architecture, the Model is responsible for the survey data storage, retrieval, and manipulation since the Model carries the data and business logic (Necula, 2024). The View in the System includes the graphical interface and the elements that include surveys, questions to be answered and statistical charts for interaction with the user. The Controller stands in the middle range between the user, the Model and the View, taking the input data from the user, confronting the Model and View with them and updating the corresponding figure as necessary.

UI Logic refers to the view part of the architecture since it is concerned with the formulation of survey questions and responses and the implementation of statistical analysis graphical representations. It ensures that the user interface is fluid and well-designed which makes it well-loved. There is another module, Input Logic, which is situated in the Controller and handles various actions taking place in the development of the site, such as answers to surveys, registration, and logins. It checks the input data to confirm whether or not it is in the right format or satisfies specific conditions known in advance (Sanchez et al., 2021). Business Logic is contained in the Model, it is achieved as intricate functions such as creation of surveys, computation of statistics and one survey per student per response inherent business logic. It follows the pattern of keeping the concerns separated and is therefore modular, and scalable and tests can be easily conducted in the application.

Testing and Security Considerations

Testing

The performance of the Student Survey Mobile Application is critical and needs to be checked and tested to ensure it is in good condition. Functional tests are used to prove the functionality of single units like the registration page, the login page, and the page for answering the survey. Integration testing checks if independently developed modules are interoperable with each other especially aimed at the data transfer between the Model, View and Controller (El-Zawawy et al., 2022). To ensure the results are accurately tested, UAT employs real users to check if the application meets their requirements and functions properly in all the situations listed. Further, there is performance testing to check the adaptation ability of applications by placing different loads to provide a smooth user experience.

Security

Security is critical in preventing loss, theft, or misuse of users' information and the authenticity of the Student Survey Mobile Application. Security for users is provided by ways of authentications that include a method of storing passwords using hashing techniques. Some sort of authorization methods guarantee that only the administrators can create, publish, and continuously manage the surveys (Mayrhofer et al., 2021). Sensitive information is shared over secure links employing the hypertext transfer protocol to lessen the danger of interception. These primary methods help to stop simple mistakes such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS). The security responsibility of the application is keenly checked and renewed frequently to check for new threats that might have evolved and make it strong against all security threats.

Reflection

Issues Faced

Few difficulties were experienced when designing the Student Survey Mobile Application. The one problem was that of data consistency while users were sharing the database and their results coinciding at the same time. For this, it was necessary to introduce transaction management to avoid data corruption. Also, coordinating user interfaces where users have unique preferences on how they want to be presented with information was difficult because it required designing too many versions based on users' feedback. Even aggregating the statistical representation of the survey results contains some problems with choosing and using proper charting libraries which are at the same time clear and visually appealing. Solving these problems required such steps as testing, implementation of received feedback, and further optimization of application architecture.

App Development Life Cycle

The life cycle of the Student Survey Mobile Application was in a structured form to develop the application, where the stages for requirement gathering and analysis were initially focused on defining the characteristics and functionalities of the application. The design is a process of constructing a system, where a site's architecture and the look of interfaces are depicted with the help of UML diagrams and wireframes. It was also organized in several iterations of sprints where implementation was done, combined with integrated and tested. Every sprint was aimed at bringing out specific features of the software and their unit and integration testing. User acceptance testing was also done to make sure that the application matched the user's requirements. Lastly, the deployment phase included establishing the target production environment and doing a more definitive performance analysis before the actual release of the application.

Conclusion

The Student Survey Mobile Application can therefore afford lessons in how to achieve the intended developmental objectives where the need to administer questionnaires to the students and get a quick, efficient and easy-to-use platform to analyze their feedback arises. When developing the application, careful attention was paid to the program architecture to foresee and create two basic but easily used interfaces for the students and flexible, powerful tools for surveys and data management for the administrators. Some difficulties could be met during the process of creation, but continuous testing with iterations and users' feedback proved the high stability of the final application. The application makes the process of surveys easier, but it is also useful for improving the educational process. It can be further extended for analysis features and includes machine learning for meaningful data from survey systems.

Reference

Journals

• Almazroi, A.A., Abualigah, L., Alqarni, M.A., Houssein, E.H., AlHamad, A.Q.M. and Elaziz, M.A., 2021. Class diagram generation from text requirements: An application of natural language processing. Deep Learning Approaches for Spoken and Natural Language Processing, pp.55-79.
• Alturas, B., 2023. Connection between UML use case diagrams and UML class diagrams: a matrix proposal. International Journal of Computer Applications in Technology, 72(3), pp.161-168.
• El-Zawawy, M.A., Faruki, P. and Conti, M., 2022. Formal model for inter-component communication and its security in android. Computing, 104(8), pp.1839-1865.
• Gaffney, K.P., Prammer, M., Brasfield, L., Hipp, D.R., Kennedy, D. and Patel, J.M., 2022. Sqlite: past, present, and future. Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, 15(12).
• Jacobson, L. and Booch, J.R.G., 2021. The unified modeling language reference manual.
• Johnson, J., 2020. Designing with the mind in mind: simple guide to understanding user interface design guidelines. Morgan Kaufmann.
• Mayrhofer, R., Stoep, J.V., Brubaker, C. and Kralevich, N., 2021. The android platform security model. ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security (TOPS), 24(3), pp.1-35.
• Modi, S., Taher, H.A. and Mahmud, H., 2021. A tool to automate student UML diagram evaluation. Academic Journal of Nawroz University, 10(2), pp.189-198.
• Necula, S., 2024. Exploring The Model-View-Controller (MVC) Architecture: A Broad Analysis of Market and Technological Applications.
• Pawlaszczyk, D., 2022. SQLite. In Mobile Forensics–The File Format Handbook: Common File Formats and File Systems Used in Mobile Devices (pp. 129-155). Cham: Springer International Publishing.
• Sabou, M., Käsznar, K., Zlabinger, M., Biffl, S. and Winkler, D., 2020, October. Verifying Extended Entity Relationship Diagrams with Open Tasks. In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (Vol. 8, pp. 132-140).
• Sanchez, D., Rojas, A.E. and Florez, H., 2022. Towards a clean architecture for android apps using model transformations. IAENG International Journal of Computer Science, 49(1), pp.270-278.
• Sutcliffe, A., 2022. Designing for user engagment: Aesthetic and attractive user interfaces. Springer Nature.
• Tiun, S., Mokhtar, U.A., Bakar, S.H. and Saad, S., 2020, April. Classification of functional and non-functional requirement in software requirement using Word2vec and fast Text. In journal of Physics: conference series (Vol. 1529, No. 4, p. 042077). IOP Publishing.

Author Bio

Jamie Morghan   4 Years | D,Sc. in egineering

I have always liked doing research and writing a thesis for engineering subjects. In my graduation years also, I was able to score the highest marks in all my submissions. Am a very determined writer who can write efficiently even for short periods. I have a lot of experience in designing assignments according to student's requirements.