Outdated Blog. Please visit: aba-blog.xyz: [2017] DonateLK: A Web Based System for Donations

Introduction

DonateLK was developed as a semester project for the module: 'Modular Software Development'. It is a web-based market place which is designed to support consumer to consumer donations. Individuals who would like to donate (Donors) as well as those who are looking for donations (Recipients) can create donor and recipient accounts respectively. After verification from the administration those individuals can then send and receive items through Donate.lk warehouse without any compromise of privacy as explained below.

Objectives

To test our ability to produce software as a team, within the given deadline.
To provide hands-on experience in application of software engineering models (Iterative Model, Extreme Programming)
To provide experience in division of work, teamwork and project management in large programming projects.

My Responsibilities

I was the team leader for a team of five. I was also the lead developer during the development of the module. I was responsible for:

Writing 7 out of 8 classes in PHP
Designing the Database
Integration of PHP and the UI designed in CSS and HTML

NOTE: The number of commits to the github repository from my profile (abarajithan11) is low due to the fact my system was having trouble with interfacing with git due to some system preferences I have set at that time. Hence most of my commits were through my team member's accounts.

Functionality

Donate.lk is a web-based market place which is designed to support consumer to consumer donations. Individuals who would like to donate (Donors) as well as those who are looking for donations (Recipients) can create donor and recipient accounts respectively. After verification from the administration those individuals can then send and receive items through Donate.lk warehouse without any compromise of privacy as explained below.

Donors and recipients can register as users to the system. A recipient must provide a short summary about himself/herself in addition to details about his/her job, salary and financial information. A recipient account is first initiated into a waiting state. An admin must review the recipient’s account and verify that the short summery is true, before making the recipient account active. The details and summery of a recipient are only visible to an admin, while only the short summery is shown to a donor.

A donor can place information about his/her item in the system. A recipient can find items through a search feature and request up to five items. Multiple recipients can request one item. A donor can view all the items he/she has donated and the requests that have arrived to his/her items. By considering the summery of each recipient, the donor confirms one request out of many, per item. This marks the item as ‘confirmed by donor’

Then the donor is given with a unique request ID, which can be used as a transaction ID. The donor can attach this ID and send the item to the administrator by mail. Then the admin marks his item’s status as ‘sent by donor’.

Items sent by donor are shown to the admin in admin’s database. The admin then receives the item and marks it as ‘received by admin’. Then he/she sends it to the recipient, marking the item as ‘sent by admin’. The recipient can track the status of the item through recipient home page. When recipient receives the item, he/she marks it as ‘received by recipient’ and that ends a transaction.

This system ensures the privacy of information of both donors and recipients. The only communication is through their transaction ID, issued by the system anonymously.

Furthermore, the system can be used by the administration to view the status of all items in transit as well as the review, terminate or suspend all user accounts.