The DaCoPan project: Student Info-Bridge
Article in governmental newspaper "Karelia" N51 from 15 of May 2004, P. 8
Title: Student Info-Bridge
Preface.
From 3 to 12 of May the delegation of developers of DaCoPan software project from Dept. of CS of the University of Helsinki stayed with official visit in the University of Petrozavodsk. DaCoPan is a pilot student project on software engineering distributed through Internet (URL is given). This project is a part of wide program of cooperation between two Universities - Petrozavodsk state university and University of Helsinki. The project is unique as for Russia so for Finland.
Main text.
The development of the project has been started at January of 2004 from the visit in Helsinki of a group of the PetrSU students-developers, those were K. Kulakov, A. Salo, A. Kryshen and A. Ananin, under the guidance of the senior lecturer D. Korzoun. During the visit the phase of customer requirements analysis to the developed product was done together with the Finnish students. From the middle of February to the beginning of May phases of design, implementation and units and subsystem testing were performed. In that time student of PetrSU V. Surikov joint the group.
During the visit in Petrozavodsk (3-12 of May) of the Finnish members of developers team, those are J. Brown, V. Vainio, J, Laine, J. Aarnila, A. Fernandez, K. Arrastia, under guidance of Prof. I. Verkamo and lecturer T. Tuohiniemi the phase of integrated testing was performed and the date of finishing project and presenting it to the customer was defined. The date is the end of May of this year.
What are the aims pursued by the project? The first one is arranging an experiment on implementation of software product by geographically distributed team of developers. One part of the team is located in Helsinki (6 students) and another one in Petrozavodsk (5 students). Communication between them is made trough Internet. Let us notice that no one Russian educational institution have experience of remote developments. PetrSU is first one from Russia participating in such experiment. The second aim was set to study methods of software development according to world standards and technologies under the conditions approaching to real industrial practice. In the frame of this project students learn in practice what does team development of complicated software product mean.
The developed software is aimed at visual demonstration of the processes happening during data transfer through Internet. Name DaCoPan comes from English title of the required program - visualization of Data Communication Protocol Through Animation. This software is of practical importance as for educational so for scientific purposes. The application example is studying courses on Internet technologies in Universities of Finland and Russia. The customer of the program is world known expert on network technologies Markku Kojo, who is one of leading researchers of CS Dept. of the University of Helsinki, co-author of series of important Internet standards on mobile data communication.
The project is supervised by two persons. From PetrSU this is head of the Dept. of CS, associate prof Yury Bogoyavlenskyi, from University of Helsinki this is senior lecturer Ju. Taina. Besides each group of students has instructor which traces and coordinates work of the group and in the case of some difficulties provides consulting. From PetrSU this is Dmitri Korzoun, from University of Helsinki this is lecturer Turjo Tuohiniemi.
