Project Management SaaS, or short PMSaaS, is a web-based tool for project management developed as part of an apprenticeship in computer engineering for application development (as part of advanced education) at the Service Prototyping Lab. The user can create new projects and employee accounts, add work packages and tasks to projects, assign employees to tasks, book hours for them, compare the booked hours to the planned person months, weigh each month differently and add expenses. The project can be edited, shared with other users and archived. To make it easier to keep track of all these things, the tool generates different graphs. This work is a result of exploring how project management can be offered as a service.
Project Management SaaS is an application based on Java Servlets with a few parts in JavaScript. The layout is created with parts of the responsive front-end framework Foundation. A MySQL database stores all the data and the Java library JFreeChart creates the graphs. It generates them with the given data and saves the chart as a JPEG file.
All you need for running PMSaaS is Tomcat, MySQL and an e-mail server. After installing it on your Tomcat server, PMSaaS will ask you for the URLs of your MySQL and your e-mail server. Fill in the setup form and PMSaaS will create a database with all the tables that are needed.
Users of PMSaaS can create new projects and users. After login, the users can see all of their projects. The page is subdivided into own projects (Your Projects), projects that someone has shared with you (Other Projects) and projects that are archived (Archived Projects).
After choosing a project, PMSaaS will show you an overview of it. You can see how much of your budget is used by now, how far apart your planned and booked effort are from each other and the timeline with all work packages and tasks. From this page, you can capture your expenses, book hours for your employees and give each month of the project another weight. You can get a more detailed view of the effort of your employees, add new work packages or tasks and share your projects with others. All projects can be edited or archived.
The administrator of PMSaaS can change the logo and branding, create new users and edit or delete them and archive, restore or delete projects. If the administrator wants to create own projects, he or she has to create a separate user account for that.
Although PMSaaS has a lot of helpful functions, there is still room for improvement. These improvements will be added to the PMSaaS Git repository.
On a personal note: During this project, I learned a lot about planning a project and the importance of good comments and documentation. Before, I often tended to forget writing comments, which is not a huge problem in small projects, but in a project with a duration over several months comments can be very helpful. Furthermore, PMSaaS ships with user documentation and developer documentation.