Have you ever wanted to get rid of your textbooks or buy some for cheap from local uni students?
Have you stayed at a college and thought, “it would be handy if I could sell this stuff to the first years next year?”
CampusTrade is a private digital buy and sell platform designed specifically for Univeristy of Queensland students and college campus attendents from neighbouring universitys. It creates a platform that allows students, faculty and staff to be able to easily trade items that relate to the academic side of univeristy or the fun community building aspects. This platform will focus on scalability, reliability and availability. CampusTrade will include amazing features such as university ID profile requirements, item listings, secure transactions, profile ratings, messaging functionality and powerful filter systems. This will lead to a fun, trustworthy and secure trading platform. CampusTrade will be accesible by both mobile and desktop devices, to ensure flexible user access.
Name: Noah Trevena
Student number: 47036321
The System will contain the following functionality:
- University Based Profile Creation: Users will have to submit a photo of their student ID upon profile creation. This will then be reviewed and approved or declined. This is so the platform stays university and college based. Students that attend UQ colleges but go to a different university will have to submit their college and room number.
- Item Listings: Users can create listings with item descriptions, pricings and tags so that items can be easily searched.
- Searching & Filtering: The system will use allow users to search by price, category and other attributes. It will also use keywords to search for tags and descriptions.
- Communication System: Private messaging will be capable once a user has decided to 'swipe up' on a listing.
- Ratings & Reviews: After a transaction has been made both parties will be able to review and rate each other.
- Alerts & Notifications: The system will alert users for message updates, listing updates and reminders when a transaction is happening.
The MVP will include the following functionality to create an informative yet minimalistic platform:
- The capabilities of being able to submit a user profile application (authentication will not be functional yet)
- Users can submit an item listing with price, description and tags
- Basic search and filter capabilities, as there will not be many listings in the MVP this should be quite functional for now
- User review and ratings will be functional after a basic private messaging capability will be implemented
The system has to be proficient enought to allow for the entirety of a univeristy (plus more) to be able to use the platform effectively. CampusTrade needs to be able to handle the large demand and account for constant user profile creation and deletion. This will be measurable by seeing if users can constantly update the databse with private messaging and item listings.
The system needs constant reliability as it is a platform that is designed for 24/7 usage. The system is expected to provide constant communication access and real-time updates that allow for users to be able to have the best possible chances of buying and selling listings. Platform reliability will be measured through error rate tracking and system uptime metrics over time.
Users should be able to intereact with the user interface constantly as the platform is designed for 24/7 use. Availability will be tested by ensuring user actions (e.g., profile updates, messages, or listings) are reflected consistently and immediately across the system for all users.
- Profile Submission: Test the profile application form to ensure correct input validation and successful data submission to the database.
- Item Listings: Verify that users can submit listings with correct details (price, description, tags) and that these display properly in the platform.
- Search and Filtering: Evaluate basic search and filtering by testing different keywords, categories, and price ranges with a small set of test listings.
- Messaging and Reviews: Simulate a basic messaging interaction between test users, followed by review/rating submission to ensure these features work as expected.
Scalability:
- This will be evaluated by inserting lots of bulk dummy data to test the databse performance and measure the API response times
- This will simulate having lots of users using the platform.
Reliability:
- Conduct manual testing over time to assess feature consistency.
- Monitor application logs for error rates during common operations (e.g., listing creation, messaging).
- Implement basic automated tests to verify core functionality after updates.
Availability:
- Perform cross-device testing to ensure real-time updates (e.g., listing visibility and messaging).
- Use uptime checks (e.g., periodic endpoint pings) to confirm system accessibility.
- Test session recovery and resilience after disconnections.