1. PROJECT: One Life

1.1. Overview

This project portfolio details my key contributions to Project One Life.

One Life is a desktop medical management application designed by me and my groups mates for a software engineering module in National University of Singapore (NUS). It aims to improve the efficiency of administrative processes in medical institutes. The project was created under the constraint that the user only interacts with the application through a Command Line Interface (CLI). It is written in Java, and has about 10 kLoC.

The main features of the project are:

  • The ability to display and schedule medical appointments.

  • The ability to display and update medical records.

  • The ability to display doctor and patient details.

  • The ability to find persons by specifying related keywords.

  • The ability to enter commands using intuitive command prompts instead of CLI for new users.

1.2. Summary of Contributions

  • Major enhancement: added the ability to schedule and display medical appointments.

    • What it does: This enhancement allows the user to schedule appointments at a specified time and date.

    • Justification: This feature improves the product significantly because a user is able to display current appointments and schedule appointments. This is a key part of medical operations in a hospital. Further checks are available to inform the user if they keyed in incorrect appointment details.

    • Highlights: This enhancement drastically improved the ability of the application to assist medical processes, specifically in the area of scheduling appointment. The implementation too was challenging as it required a brand new command to be created.

  • Minor enhancement: added the ability to check for valid date and time which is useful for scheduling and updating commands.

  • Code contributed: [Functional code] [RepoSense]

  • Other contributions:

    • Project management:

      • Managed releases v1.1 - v1.4 (4 releases) on GitHub.

      • Set up travis for continuous integration of the code base.

      • Set up auto publishing of documentation for travis.

    • Enhancements to existing features:

      • Wrote additional tests for existing features to increase coverage %. (Pull requests #11, #68)

    • Documentation:

      • Did cosmetic tweaks to existing contents of the User Guide. (Pull requests #123, #192, #203)

    • Community:

      • Reviewed other team members' pull requests. (Pull request #124)

      • Reported bugs and suggestions for other teams in the class. (Pull requests #124, #204)

2. Contributions to the User Guide

Given below are sections I contributed to the User Guide. They showcase my ability to write documentation targeting end-users.

2.1. Displaying medical appointments : select

Displays a list of medical appointments that are currently scheduled for the specified person.
Format: select INDEX

  • Selects the person and loads the appointment list of the person at the specified INDEX.

  • The index is the position of the person selected from the person card list.

  • The index must be a positive integer 1, 2, 3, …​

  • The appointment list will be displayed on the top right of the screen.

Examples:

  • list displays the list of persons as shown in the figure below.

    ListCommand
    Figure 1. Display list diagram

    select 2 selects the 2nd person in the database and display the appointments of that person on the top right of the screen as shown in the figure below.

    DisplayAppointment
    Figure 2. Display appointment diagram

  • find Betsy
    select 1
    Selects the 1st patient in the results of the find command and display the appointments. This is similar to the example above.

2.2. Scheduling medical appointments : schedule

Schedules a patient/doctor for a medical appointment at a specific date and time.
Format: schedule INDEX d/DATE st/START_TIME et/END_TIME dn/DOCTOR_NAME di/DOCTOR_NRIC pn/PATIENT_NAME pi/PATIENT_NRIC

  • Date is formatted as DD.MM.YYYY and is dot separated. e.g. 7.11.1996 is the 7th of November 1996

  • Time uses the 24-hour clock time. e.g. 1300 is 1pm

  • Doctor name is the doctor’s full name. e.g. John Doe

  • Doctor nric is the doctor’s nric. e.g. S1234567B

  • Patient name is the patient’s full name. e.g. Kim Tan

  • Patient nric is the patient’s nric. e.g. S1234567A

Overlapping of timing with existing appointments is considered a clash. E.g. 1300-1301 and 1301-1302 is a clash due to 1301.

Examples:

  • schedule 1 d/23.11.2018 st/1300 et/1400 dn/Jack di/S1234567B pn/John Doe pi/S1234567A
    Schedules John Doe for an appointment with doctor Jack on the 23nd of November 2018 from 1pm to 2pm.

    An example of a successful schedule is shown in the figure below.

    ScheduleSuccess
    Figure 3. Successful schedule diagram

    After an appointment is successfully scheduled, the appointment list as shown below will be updated.

    AppointmentListChange
    Figure 4. Change in appointment list

    An example of an unsuccessful schedule is shown in the figure below.

    ScheduleFailure
    Figure 5. Unsuccessful schedule diagram

3. Contributions to the Developer Guide

Given below are sections I contributed to the Developer Guide. They showcase my ability to write technical documentation and the technical depth of my contributions to the project.

3.1. Schedule command feature

3.1.1. Current implementation

The scheduling appointment mechanism is facilitated by ScheduleCommandParser, ScheduleCommand, Appointment and AppointmentManager. ScheduleCommand extends from Command and ScheduleCommandParser implements Parser. The key operation implemented is ScheduleCommand#execute.

Given below is an example usage scenario and how the schedule command mechanism behaves at each step.

Step 1. The user wants to schedule an appointment. User proceeds to fill in the details behind the respective prefixes.

For example: schedule 1 d/23.11.2018 st/1300 et/1400 dn/Jack di/S1234567B pn/John Doe pi/S1234567A

Step 2. The user executes the ScheduleCommand which calls the ScheduleCommandParser. ScheduleCommandParser will parse the inputs and return a ScheduleCommand.

Step 3. ScheduleCommand then executes. ScheduleCommand then conducts various checks sequentially to ensure that the appointment scheduled is valid. If it is invalid, an exception message will be thrown. The Appointment will not be scheduled. The order of checks conducted is displayed in the image below.

AppointmentCheckingFlow

Step 4. A successful check gives 2 objects, personToEdit and Appointment object. Program creates another Person object called editedPerson that is equal to personToEdit. ScheduleCommand then adds Appointment to the appointmentList of editedPerson. Lastly, ScheduleCommand replaces personToEdit with editedPerson in our model. This is shown in the diagram below.

ScheduleCommandStep4

The above procedure in step 4 is then repeated for the other person (e.g. the other person is a doctor if the specified person is a patient) involved in the scheduling process.

Step 5. XmlAdaptedPerson updates storage of appointmentList.

The following sequence diagram shows how the schedule appointment operation works:

ScheduleSequenceDiagram
Figure 6. Sequence diagram for scheduling appointments

3.1.2. Design Considerations

This section describes the pros and cons of the current and other alternate implementations of schedule.

Aspect: Command for schedule command

  • Alternative 1 (current choice): Take in the inputs for schedule appointment command using one prefix for each detail. For example: schedule 1 d/23.11.2018 st/1300 et/1400 dn/Jack di/S1234567B pn/John Doe pi/S1234567A

    • Pros: The design is consistent with the other commands in the application.

    • Cons: It requires the user to type more when scheduling an appointment.

  • Alternative 2: Use a comma-separated long string in the command prompt to schedule an appointment. For example: schedule 1 s/23.11.2018,1300,1400,Jack,S1234567B,John Doe,S1234567A

    • Pros: The user has to type less when scheduling a command. The user is not required to type all the prefixes, he just has to type one prefix, s/.

    • Cons: The design would not be consistent with the other commands. This might confuse the user.

Aspect: Sorting of appointments

  • Alternative 1 (current choice): Do not sort the appointments in the ArrayList of appointments. A new appointment is added to the back of the ArrayList.

    • Pros: It is simple to check for appointment clashes. To check for appointment clashes, just loop through the ArrayList and check the new appointment against every other appointment. The simplicity is shown in code below.

      public static boolean isClash(Appointment appointment, Appointment otherAppointment) {
    if (appointment.isClash(otherAppointment)) {
        return true;
    }
    return false;
}

    • Cons: It might not be the most efficient way.

  • Alternative 2: Sort the appointments in the ArrayList of appointments. Maintain a sorted list of appointments based on the date and time of appointments.

    • Pros: It might be more efficient when checking for appointment clashes. We do not need to check our new appointment against all the appointments in the ArrayList. For example we can check from the last (latest) appointment down the list until a point where the next appointment ends before this appointment. At that point we can stop checking as we know that there will be no more clashes.

    • Cons: The efficiency gain when checking for clashes might be lost due to efficiency lost due to sorting being required.