project-proposal-2025

Brisbane City Reporting App

Abstract

Have you ever wanted to report an issue to the city council such as a deceased animal on the side of the road, a pothole or a tree that has fallen over but did not know how or who to contract and did not feel like navigating the messy maze of government/council websites? The Brisbane City Reporting application allows citizens to log issues directly with the council and track them. It features a public-facing interface for logging issues and a council-facing interface for managing and resolving them.

Author

Name: Riley Whitlock

Student number: 46987033

Functionality

The system provides a simple application that allows users to log issues with the city council and track them. This can range from potholes, deceased animals along the side of the road or even trees that have fallen over. It will also allow city council workers to change the status of and post updates for publicly logged issues in a separate application available to the council only.

Features

Public Facing End:

• Users can create an account and log in
• Citizens can log issues to the city council
  • Upload a photo or video
  • Provide an address or geo marker
• Can view all issues that have been publicly logged by themselves or other citizens (should include filtering ability)
• Can search for and filter issues by location, issue type and issue status
• Can track issues and receive notifications for tracked issues

Council Facing End:

• Can view, search for and filter issues logged by users
• Can remove or verify (determine if issue is actually an issue i.e. issue stating that neighbour is too loud will be rejected) logged issues
• Can post updates to issues (including photos/videos)
• Can update the status of issues, issue statuses include but no limited too (can include more if desired)
  • Pending Review
  • Yet to be Resolved
  • Being Resolved
  • Resolved
• Can generate reports from issue database

Scope

The scope of the MVP of this system will include the following features.

Public Facing Application:

• Account:
  • Basic user account system
• Issue Logging
  • Upload information about issue (simple text description along with predefined fields i.e. issue type, issue severity etc.)
  • Ability to upload photos and/or videos
  • Ability to add geo marker or address
• Searching
  • Filter all issues (only displays issues that have been verified by the council or from those submitted by the user) by issue type, severity, distance from user (if they agree to share there location), location (i.e. suburb) and tracked issues (if the user has tracked a particular issue)
  • Map-view of all verified and issues that are not resolved
• Issue Tracking
  • Users can select issues to track (issues created by the user are automatically tracked)
  • Users receive notifications for tracked issues (whenever there is an update or status change for that issue) either through SMS or email

Council Facing Application:

• Account:
  • Basic user account system
  • Mandatory MFA
• Issue Verification
  • View all issues that are pending review
  • Ability to approve or reject issues
  • Ability to update details of issue submitted by user (i.e. changing the severity or address of the issue)
• Searching
  • Filter all issues by issue type, severity, location (i.e. suburb)
  • Map-view of all issues (that have not been rejected or resolved)
• Issue Updates
  • Can change the status of issues
  • Can add comments to issues
  • Can upload photos or videos that are visible to the public facing end
• Reports
  • Can generate reports from issue database

Quality Attributes

Availability: Availability is crucial to the Brisbane City Reporting App because it needs to always be accessible and functional as the issues reported could pose a danger to the public (i.e. tree blocking major road or malfunctioning traffic light). Citizens may use this application at any time of the day to log and report hazards, especially during emergencies (i.e. cyclone Alfred) or to view existing issues that may be hazardous. Council workers may also use this application to post important updates/status changes for issues that pose safety concerns. Ensuring high availability allows more users to access the application increasing the likelihood of timely reports and faster council responses.

Scalability: Scalability is also crucial to the Brisbane City Reporting App since it needs to provide consistent functionality during peak usage which may occur at unpredictable times. During events such as Cyclone Alfred, usage may be spike dramatically (significantly more issues being reported) than usual so the system needs to scale to maintain responsiveness and avoid service disruptions.

Extensibility: Extensibility is important to the Brisbane City Reporting App since new issue types and fields (filled out by user when reporting issues) may need to be added in the future to better capture the diverse nature of logged issues. The addition of new issue types and fields needs to be possible without entirely refactoring the application.

Evaluation

Availability: To evaluate the system’s availability, various scenarios should simulate different real-world conditions, including normal usage, high load periods, and component failures. Monitoring tools should be used to monitor the availability of the system during tests. Synthetic monitoring tools will ping key system endpoints at regular intervals (e.g., every minute) to track uptime and response consistency over time. Additionally, downtime recovery simulations (manually stop services to see how fast the system recovers) should also be run to determine how well the system recovers and how quickly it becomes available again when components fail. Will be considered successful if:

• Uptime remains above an acceptable threshold during evaluation
• Recovering from service failure occurs within an acceptable timeframe

Scalability: To evaluate the systems availability, stress testing should be conducted to simulate increased levels of user requests. These tests will assess how well the system maintains performance under growing demand and whether its architecture can handle increased load. Performance metrics such as average response time, error rates, and throughput will be monitored across varying load levels, with a particular focus on a worst-case scenario. In the worst-case scenario, the system will experience five times the average expected traffic to simulate peak load conditions that the system could expect to receive during a major event (i.e. cyclone Alfred). Will be considered successful if:

• Response time remains within 2x of baseline under maximum simulated load
• Additional infrastructure (i.e. AWS EC2 instances or containers) can be deployed dynamically without manual intervention

Extensibility: To evaluate the systems extensibility, new feature additions will be simulated during development.

• Add new issue type (i.e. ‘streetlight flickering’) and ensure it appears correctly in the frontend (both the public and council facing applications), backend database and in reports generated in the council facing application
• Add a new optional field for issue logging (i.e. ‘is the issue affecting traffic?’) and validate that the system can handle this field without modifying core logic or breaking existing functionality

The time and effort (in terms of lines of code and affected modules) required to implement the new features will be measured. Will be considered successful if

• specified additions can be added by extending configurations/metadata without modifying multiple code components or reworking existing data models
• Does not break previously logged issues.