Athlete Connect
Abstract
Meet AthleteConnect—a modern SaaS platform that revolutionizes sports talent discovery, evaluation, and recruitment. Serving athletes and organizations, it functions as a centralized hub for essential data—from performance stats and achievements to injury histories and skill assessments. Athletes create professional, multimedia-enhanced profiles, while teams in leagues such as the NRL and Super Rugby can easily search, analyze, and scout emerging talent. By addressing traditional recruitment gaps, especially for players without strong industry connections, AthleteConnect delivers comprehensive data for informed decision-making. Its built-in auction feature enables real-time contract negotiations for transparent, competitive talent acquisition. Powered by a microservices architecture designed for high availability, scalability, and reliability, the platform offers robust security and multi-tenancy to protect sensitive data. AthleteConnect makes sports recruitment fairer, faster, and more accessible.
Author
Name: Jigyasu Mittal
Student number: 48205825
Functionality
At full maturity, AthleteConnect transforms talent acquisition by merging data, technology, and community. Key features include:
Comprehensive Player Profiles:
Athletes showcase skills, achievements, records, and injury history in rich multimedia profiles for rapid scout evaluation.
Data Analysis & Reporting:
- Interactive Charts & Graphs: Visual tools (line graphs, bar charts, dashboards) reveal trends and enable side-by-side comparisons.
- Historical Trends: Monitor progress in metrics like speed, stamina, and scoring to guide coaching.
Auction & Contract Negotiation:
A transparent bidding platform lets organizations place live offers while athletes review multiple proposals in a secure interface, expediting deals.
Networking & Community Engagement:
Facilitate connections, endorsements, and direct messaging between athletes and organizations to streamline tryouts, feedback, and contracts.
Secure, Multi-Tenant Architecture:
Each user’s data is isolated through robust authentication, encryption, and compliance measures.
Payment Integration & Subscription Management:
A pay-as-you-go model enables scalable subscriptions, with integrated gateways for fees, subscriptions, and auction deposits.
AthleteConnect not only fills gaps in sports recruitment but elevates the process by uniting data, technology, and community—creating a fairer, faster, and more exciting path for athletes and teams.
Scope
The MVP delivers essential features to validate user needs and build a scalable foundation:
User Registration & Authentication
- Players: Register with basic details (name, sport, position, contact info).
- Organizations: Register with team/company information using role-based access controls.
- Secure Login: Use password-based authentication (HTTPS, hashed passwords) with future plans for OAuth2.
Profile Creation & Management
- Player Profiles: Input core stats, achievements, and injury history.
- Organization Profiles: Provide team name, contact details, and scouting requirements.
Search & Discovery
- Filtering: Enable filtering by sport, position, or performance indicators.
- Listings: A simple interface for browsing athlete profiles.
Networking & Community Engagement
- Enable athletes and organizations to connect, follow, and endorse each other, with basic messaging for direct communication.
Auction & Contract Negotiation (Initial)
- Direct Contact: Organizations access player contact details to initiate discussions; full auction features will be added later.
Security & Multi-Tenant Setup
- Data Isolation: Use basic techniques to prevent accidental data sharing, along with role-based access and HTTPS encryption.
Essential Payment Integration
- Pay-as-You-Go: Implement a basic subscription or one-time fee model for profile visibility or advanced search features using trusted providers like Stripe or PayPal.
Quality Attributes
Below is a brief discussion of key quality attributes and how they will be achieved. Although AWS services has been referenced, similar principles can be applied using Azure, Google Cloud, or on-premises solutions.
Availability
Definition:
“On demand” means the platform is accessible 24/7 regardless of location. High availability is crucial since recruitment windows are time-sensitive, and downtime may delay decisions.
How It Will Be Achieved:
- Microservices & Replication: Run each core feature on dedicated instances/containers across multiple availability zones.
- Load Balancing: Evenly distribute requests to avoid bottlenecks.
- Auto Scaling & Health Checks: Dynamically adjust resources and use failover mechanisms (e.g., DNS failover).
Reliability
Definition:
The system must consistently function without disruptions or data loss.
How It Will Be Achieved:
- No Single Point of Failure: Deploy services redundantly across multiple zones so that if one fails, another remains operational.
- Resilient Microservices: Isolate services to prevent local issues from affecting the entire system.
- Robust Data Storage: Use multi-AZ failover, continuous backups, and point-in-time recovery.
Scalability
Definition:
AthleteConnect must handle variable and high user loads without performance degradation or soaring costs, adapting to sudden spikes typical in recruitment cycles.
How It Will Be Achieved:
- Auto Scaling: Dynamically adjust the number of instances/containers using auto scaling groups.
- Caching Layers: Utilize caching (e.g., Redis or Memcached) to offload frequent queries.
- Distributed Architecture: A stateless, modular design enables horizontal scaling as demand increases.
Security
Definition:
The platform must remain secure against attacks and misuse, protecting sensitive data. AthleteConnect deals with personal and potentially sensitive data, making robust security measures non-negotiable.
How It Will Be Achieved:
- VPC Isolation & Role-Based Access: Run all services within a secure Virtual Private Cloud with public subnets hosting only front-end services and private subnets hosting backend and databases.
- Multi-Tenancy: Isolate each user’s data to prevent unauthorized cross-access.
- Encryption & MFA: Encrypt data in transit (HTTPS/TLS) and at rest; enforce Multi-Factor Authentication for sensitive accounts.
- Monitoring & Alerts: Use continuous logging and regular security audits to quickly detect and respond to unauthorized activities.
Extensibility
Definition:
The platform should evolve by adding new sports, features, or integrations without major rework.
How It Will Be Achieved:
- Modular Architecture: Build services with well-defined APIs for seamless updates.
- API-First & Containerization: Enable rapid integration of new features.
Trade-Offs & Priorities
- High Availability vs. Cost: Redundancy and load balancing are essential for minimizing downtime, which is critical for user trust and satisfaction, even though they increase operational costs.
- Top Priorities – Security and Availability: Given the sensitive nature of the data and the time-critical requirements of recruiters, ensuring robust security and continuous availability are the foremost objectives.
- Next Priorities – Reliability and Scalability: These attributes guarantee that the platform delivers consistent performance as the user base grows, ensuring a seamless experience for all users.
- Future Priority – Extensibility: While strategically important for long-term evolution, extensibility will be enhanced gradually once the core functionalities are stable.
Evaluation
Practical, measurable methods to evaluate whether AthleteConnect meets its quality objectives:
Availability
- Uptime Monitoring: Use tools like CloudWatch, Pingdom, or Nagios to record 24/7 uptime, targeting 99.9% monthly uptime.
- Load Balancer Evaluation: Monitor metrics such as request distribution, response latency, and health check success to verify balanced traffic.
- Simulated Traffic: Run synthetic transactions to assess response times and detect downtime under varying loads.
Reliability
- Error Rate Analysis: Track HTTP 4xx/5xx responses with log parsers (e.g., CloudWatch, ELK, Sentry) to maintain error rates below 1%.
- Soak Testing: Use JMeter or Locust for continuous load tests to detect performance degradation or memory leaks.
- Automated Regression Testing: Integrate tests into CI/CD pipelines for continuous system monitoring.
Scalability
- Load & Stress Testing: Incrementally simulate traffic with JMeter or Locust, measuring response times and throughput until degradation occurs.
- Burst Traffic Simulation: Test the system’s reaction to sudden spikes to ensure auto scaling provisions extra resources promptly.
- Throughput Testing: Measure maximum requests per second while monitoring resource utilization.
Security
- Access Controls & Activity Logging: Audit logs (via CloudTrail or local systems) to verify that only authorized roles access features.
- Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA): Enforce MFA on sensitive accounts and track compliance via usage logs.
- Multitenancy Isolation Testing: Create test tenants and simulate cross-tenant access; success equals zero data leakage.
- Input Validation & Sanitization Testing: Use OWASP ZAP, Burp Suite, and manual tests to ensure all inputs are sanitized.
Extensibility
- Time-to-Feature Metric: Track the development cycle from feature concept to release using project management tools, aiming for minimal overhead.
- Integration Testing: Introduce a new module (e.g., an analytics dashboard) and evaluate its seamless integration with minimal code changes.
AthleteConnect is engineered to meet rigorous quality standards through these practical evaluation methods. By merging robust technology with a user-centric design, it sets a new benchmark in sports recruitment—delivering a secure, reliable, scalable, and extensible platform that benefits both athletes and organizations.