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Project ID: JD12 - JB02 - 00004

Project Title: Trouble Ticket Tracking System

Team Work

Name ID

Supervisor: Dr. Mostafa saleh

Jeddah

2012

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgement…………………………………………………………………….3

1- Introduction………………………………………………………………………..4

2- Planning…………………………………………………………………………...6

2.1. Clear statement of aims………………………………………………………..…7

2.2. Project Domain……………………………………………………………….…..7

2.3 Statement of Requirements…………………………………………………….….8

3- Doing………………………………………………………………………………9

3.1. The literature search and the findings relevant to the project…………………...10

3.1.2. The key resources and search strategies………………………………………10

3.2. The particular approach used……………………………………………………11

3.2.1. The approach and methods used………………………………………………11

3.3. The activities and reasons for them………………………………………….….15

4- Reviewing………………………………………………………………..………18

4.1.1. Implementation………………………………………………………………..19

4.1.2. Testing…….………………………………………………………………...…21

5- Conclusion……………………………………………………………………….24

6- List of references………………………………………………………..……….25

7- Appendices……………………………………………………………..………..26

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Acknowledgement:

Before everything we have to thank Allah for all his blessings that enabled us to

understand and complete our tasks for this project and everywhere in our lives.

We would like to thank and acknowledge our supervisor Dr. Mostafa Saleh for his

continuous support and encouragements. We also would like to introduce a special thanks

to all of our tutors for the last 4 years of my studies in Arab Open University.

I would like to thank my family and my friends and colleagues for their support. Without

their support maybe it will take me longer time to be where I already am.

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Chapter 1

Introduction

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1. Introduction

TTTS serves the goal of guaranteed solution for each possible problem as soon as

possible. It helps the organization, employees and eventually customers.

The issue of handling each problem in a separate manner will result in a slow process

each time you face a problem, and with time problem may be left behind with no solution

if there is no system to force the employees to solve it.

TTTS will have a great impact when any organization decides to use it. Smooth flow of

work will increase the trust of the customer in this organization, efficiency of the

employees will definitely improve and the income will increase gradually.

Today, we have many issues that can be handled by this application and many types of

businesses will benefit from it. For example, Internet Service Provider company.

We will use our new methodology in evaluating the last release to help us improve our

processes and develop a new system that will meet the customer current and future

requirements.

Prevent the occurrence of tasks jam, organizing the tasks in a strong system will insure

finishing each task in scheduled time. This system will allow the customer to open a

trouble ticket through a web page and that ticket will be assigned to one of the staff. This

employee can fix the problem and close the ticket after confirming with the customer to

ensure QoS, if this employee was unable to solve the problem he can assign the ticket to

another employee in another department. The system will keep notifying the employee

about this ticket until it is solved and closed. All open tickets will be sent to a higher level

employee (supervisor or manager) to follow up with the employees. There will be help

topics included with this system to help the employees to use it and to know what the

frequent possible issues they will face are.

The required activities to implement this solution are to create an SQL database and

connect it to the web to allow the employees and the customer to interact with a friendly

useful interface.

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Chapter 2

Planning

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2. Planning

2.1 Clear statement of aims

1. To facilitate supporting the customers through this application, because the customer

will be able to open the trouble ticket by himself and describe his problem through this

application.

2. To help the staff organizing their required tasks and keep track of all possible issues.

3. The organization will have the opportunity to improve their QoS which will reflect on

the sales in a good way.

4. This application will generate deferent kind of reports as per the needs of the

organization. And it will be connected to the database.

5. It will keep history for all solved issues to make it easier to solve in future.

2.2 Project Context Description

Project domain:

This project serves a wide area of companies especially IT solutions providers. In order

to streamline support requests and better serve their customers. Every support request is

assigned a unique ticket number which you can use to track the progress and responses

online. For your reference we provide complete archives and history of all your support

requests.

Background needed to carry out the project:

We have already some experience in old technologies like FrontPage and medium size

database software Microsoft Access and some knowledge about Visual basic and C++

and later Microsoft Expression but to get more power and editing capabilities we used

Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2010 and it offers many tools to handle the

implementation phase and it has the design view and the source view and both are very

helpful to accomplish the intended task.

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I knew also about CRUD (Create, read, update and delete) refers to all of the major

functions that are implemented in relational database applications. Each letter in the

acronym can map to a standard SQL statement and HTTP method.

Operation SQL HTTP

Create INSERT POST

Read (Retrieve) SELECT GET

Update (Modify) UPDATE PUT / PATCH / MERGE

Delete (Destroy) DELETE DELETE

2.3 Statement of Requirements

Data Requirements:

There are no data requirements for this application. The data will be entered by users of

the web application when it is launched. Trouble tickets then will be stored in the

database and can be retrieved any time from there.

Functional Requirements:

There will be no calculations, data manipulation and processing. It will follow up any

case until resolved and closed then saved as a history for further noticing.

Some of the Functional Requirements is to be able to search by name, search by date.

And the ability to create users. Also to assign a ticket for an employee.

Software, Hardware or any other Requirements:

The software requirements are much minimized and that is one of the reasons I chose to

make a web application rather than a windows application. You need a standard up to

date web browser like Firefox or Google Chrome or Internet Explorer.

The hardware requirements are also normal, any normal PC with standard specification is

enough.

A computer which has XP windows or later as operating system, ram of 512 or higher,

free memory of 2GB or higher, a CD Drive and PS/2 connection ports.

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Chapter 3

Doing

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3. Doing

3.1. The literature search and the findings relevant to the project

The gaps identified in our knowledge and understanding

When we needed to do any task we tried to find resources about the task we wanted to

perform. We found books, friends, personal experience and also on the Internet. We

started our search for some sites that talk about graduation projects to gain some ideas

and learn how to handle such projects. After we came up with our idea we started to look

for some sites that give hints on how to plan a project. Also, we tried to look for sites that

offer a Trouble Ticket Systems. Moreover, we looked for sites that teach programming

languages such as VB.net and ASP.net which helped us to choose the programming

language to build our project.

After all that search we ended up with big amount of websites and some books so we

started to minimize them to end up with very few that we can really use in our project.

3.1.2. The key resources and search strategies they used to locate the

information they needed, and how useful they were

The key resources

The key resources were the books of the courses we studies in Arab Open University link

M359 and MT262. Also we used the search engines of Internet to find whatever we need

to do our project.

Search strategies they used

1. We specify the important concepts of our search.

2. Find the keywords that relate these concepts.

3. Check whether there are some other words of the same meaning or related terms.

4. Decide which search features may apply, including shortening, Boolean operators,

and so on.

5. Pick a search engine.

6. Read the how to use the search engine in the help section in the home page.

7. Judge the results. How many hits were returned? Were the results relevant to your

query?

8. Modify your search if needed. And go repeat the earlier steps.

9. Do the same in a different search engine.

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3.2. The particular approach used

3.2.1. The approach or methods they used and the reasons for choosing them

An overview of the particular life-cycle model used with reasons of choosing it for

student's particular project

To develop our project we will need some roles. As a start we will use the Life Cycle

which is a description of all the events and activities in the life of a software system or

product and the sequence in which they happen. After that we will follow the known

technical activities for the development of software (Analyzing, Design, Implementation

and Testing).

Conceptual Model (ERD)

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Specification Model (Data Flow Diagram and Use case diagram):

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Use Case Diagram:

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The software or modeling tools they used, what they used them for and the

limitations, if any (4)

MS Project 2007

ASP.NET

Microsoft SQL server 2010 Express

Microsoft Visual C# 2010 Express

Microsoft Word 2007

Adobe Photoshop

The program version The use of it MS Visual Studio 2010

Express

2010 We well use it to write code

because it is an object-oriented

programming language that can

be viewed as a progression of

Microsoft's Visual Basic (VB).

Microsoft SQL server 2010 Express

2005 Microsoft SQL Server is a

relational model database server

produced by Microsoft. Its

primary query languages, we

used it to establish our database

for our project.

Microsoft Office Word 2007 2007 The famous word editor is used

to format my report completely

and even save it as a PDF file. I

used it also for all of my

drawings.

Ms Office PowerPoint 2007 2007 It is a presentation program that

we will use for our presentation

for final discussion.

Ms Office Project 2007 2007 I used this software to draw our

plan and it helped us to finish

the project on time.

Adobe Photoshop CS3 I created my logo using Adobe

Photoshop.

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3.3. The activities and reasons for them

What they did to achieve the aims and targets they set themselves.

What they did to achieve the aims and targets they set themselves. If they have changed

the aims along the way, the change and reasons for it should be included here (6)

As a group of two students we agreed to meet once a week to discuss the progress of our

work and our target was to complete the task before the time. But we face some obstacles

like the difficulty of meeting because both of are working full time duties in completely

different timings. We used the instant messenger’s applications to make up for that and it

was somehow fulfilling for our goals but not exactly like classic meetings.

As a matter of fact, we did change the way of crating the project. At first we wanted to

make as a web application then we changed it to a windows application and finally we

changed it back to a web application because of styling advantages that is available

comparing to the windows application.

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Functional Dependencies:

User {UserID, LoginID, IsActive, Password, LoginCount, SecurityAnswer,

SecurityQuestionID}

TicketDetails {TicketId, Year, Name, Email, Subject, Description, Status,

Priority, IsActive, CreatedBy, DepartmentId, Comment1, Comment2,

CreatedDate, ModifiedDate, ModifiedBy, AssignedTo, Category,

MobileNumeber }

R (set of all functional dependencies) ={

FD 1: UserID LoginID, IsActive, Password, LoginCount, SecurityAnswer,

SecurityQuestionID

FD 2: SecurityAnswer Password

FD 3: SecurityQuestionID SecurityAnswer

FD 4: TicketId Year, Name, Email, Subject, Description, Status, Priority,

IsActive, CreatedBy, DepartmentId, Comment1, Comment2, CreatedDate,

ModifiedDate, ModifiedBy, AssignedTo, Category, MobileNumeber

FD 5: MobileNumber Status, Priority, CreatedBy, CreatedDate, Category,

AssignedTo

}

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Field name Data Type Primary key Foreign Key Ind

What choices or decisions, with justifications, they had to make up to keep

project on track:

We thought of many options to develop this application. First thing came up to our mind

is JAVA but after that we figured out that is possible to use other languages where the

interface is easier to design and implement. So our next choice was VB.Net and later we

discovered it will be more easy and convenient to make it as a web application to enable

our clients to know about our services via our web site in case we published it in future

on the internet. Then we decided to use asp.net because it combines between the friendly

interfaces and in addition it is very convenient to use and has very minimum

requirements.

In the other hand we have to make a database and we have some options like Microsoft

Access and Microsoft SQL. We chose the latest and that is because we have some

background using it and plus its amazing capabilities and ease of use. And that is how we

accomplished our web application.

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Chapter 4

Reviewing

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4. Reviewing

4.1.1. Implementation

I created my database using Microsoft SQL 2008 express and it contains three tables.

One for the tickets and one for the users and one to identify what is the group for that

user. Here you can find a list of the tables.

Tickets Table: tblTicketsDetails

Field name Data Type Primary Key TicketId int Yes

DepartmentId int No Year int No

Name nvarchar No Email varchar No

MobileNumebr varchar No

Subject nvarchar No Description nvarchar No

Comment1 nvarchar No Comment2 nvarchar No

Status int No

Priority int No CreatedDate datetime No

CreatedBy int No ModifiedDate datetime No

ModifiedBy int No AssignedTo int No

Category int No

UserID int No

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Users Table: tblUser

Field name Data Type Primary Key UserID Int Yes

LoginID varchar No IsActive bit No

SecurityAnswer varchar No

SecurityQuestionID int No Password binary No

LoginCount int No RoldId int No

Admin Table: tblAdmin

Field name Data Type Primary Key RoleId int Yes

RoleName varchar No

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4.1.2. Testing

If you tried to search or add or update a ticket you will get this message

If the password two fields do not match you will get this error

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4.2. Reflecting on achievements

The scope for future work

We are looking forward to add some improvements and features to our system like

uploading the site online and enable the clients to submit their problems online. Add

more groups will be necessary because we have now admins and normal users, so there

will be other departments as per the need of the establishment like sales, managers,

finance and helpdesk operators. Each group will have different privileges and

permissions.

Offering the Arabic language user interface will be considered also. And adding a NEWS

toolbar is suggested too.

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Chapter 5

Conclusion

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5. Conclusion

It was a great chance for us to get a grasp of big IT field which is web development. This

project is done as required to complete the last course of Information Technology, and it

forced us to utilize what we already learned in the last 4 years. Even though this project is

done at the same time with studying other courses and it was short period for me to do

my first project.

We collected information from many places and hopefully we used them in a good way

to achieve our goals.

Trouble Ticket Tracking System is definitely cannot be compared to any other

professional similar system but it does the task and purpose which it is made for in very

essential and simple way. I can’t see why not using this web application for real in small

businesses as free open source software.

List of references

http://www.w3schools.com/sql/sql_quickref.asp

http://www.w3schools.com/sql/sql_foreignkey.asp

http://www.asp.net/web-pages/overview/what%27s-new/top-features-in-web-pages-2

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa288436%28v=vs.71%29.aspx

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Appendices

New ticket page