CS460/465 Senior Capstone Project I & II (3 + 3 cr. hrs.)
Indiana University–Purdue University Fort Wayne
Senior Design Project Proposal
The project is designed for a team of students working toward completion of a project, within two semesters1.
Title
Sponsor
Helping a High-Performing Department Go from Good to Great
Lincoln Financial Group
Type
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Description
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Team size
1In
Application
development
Information systems
Research-focused
Lincoln Financial Group (LFG) is a Fortune 250 company with a national
customer base. LFG offers a variety of retirement solutions and financial
services to our trading partners.
The goal of this project is to work with our Business Development team,
which has oversight of the tools that bring in over $8B in annual premiums.
o Specifically, the goal is to help automate the processes of our software
development life cycle that remain quite manual today. This team is
more effective than efficient. We have the desire to “work smarter not
harder” and feel that an outside perspective can help us do that.
o Our team follows the standard Software Development Lifecycle in order
to fulfill specific requests from our customers in an accurate and timely
manner. Each member of our team fulfills a specific role in the lifecycle
process. Our intake analyst creates Requirements based on customer
requests, the Developers design and code based on the requirements,
and Quality Assurance analysts write and execute test scripts to ensure
requirements are correctly implemented. As a last step, we deploy the
code and complete regression testing. Throughout this process, all
team members are expected to effectively communicate updates to a
variety of audiences.
o In current state, each step of this process is quite manual. The goal of
this Project is to look for ways where we can take all of these subprocesses and reduce re-work and manual entry of information.
Specific processes that would be excellent candidates for automation
include our task management workflow and the execution of test
scripts.
LFG will provide details of the tools we use today, as well as an overview of
the business side. We can help students understand more about the
business side, and where various departments add value in the context of
an organization.
o The end result should be an intuitive UI that 1) provides better
transparency of our task workflow and 2) allows for each role in our
lifecycle to leverage the work of the other roles and 3) reduces waste.
2
3
4
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general, one semester has 15 weeks. For a 3 cr. hrs. course, a student is expected to work min of 8 hrs. per week for the project
which is equivalent to min of 120 hours.
CS460/465 Senior Capstone Project I & II (3 + 3 cr. hrs.)
Required
backgrounds
None specifically
Required
resources
(HW/SW)
None specifically
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Additional
requirements
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Other notes
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1In
Indiana University–Purdue University Fort Wayne
There are various areas in which the students could add value. We will
provide an overview and work together to hone in on the most valueadding use of their time.
Documentation is crucial, as the Lincoln team will be taking over the
administration of the tool(s) created after the students’ project has
completed.
Lincoln can work with the students to create outputs of this UI (most
feasible would be metrics, a “dashboard” for task management workflow,
automation of test scripts, etc.).
We will work together to determine appropriate milestones, along with a
plan to measure and evaluate the results.
This project is important and interesting. The students will get a sense of
how real-world business departments interact with information technology
to solve problems for our end customers.
Lincoln is also interested in getting to know a set of students and where
their interests lie, in order to further reduce barriers between the business
world and educational assets in the community.
The team that the students will be working with has an asymmetric impact
on LFG’s processes and bottom line. Automation efforts will help the
Lincoln team focus on areas in which we can all add the most value.
general, one semester has 15 weeks. For a 3 cr. hrs. course, a student is expected to work min of 8 hrs. per week for the project
which is equivalent to min of 120 hours.