Automated Educational Timetabling Software

The Product

The Automated Educational Timetabling Software provides a solution for the scheduling issues that were present at the Leiden University Faculty of Social Sciences, specifically the Psychology department. Creating the schedule for the next year would take at least a week of manual labor and a lot of back and forth between team leaders and the teachers. Our software aims to solve this problem by taking the preferences of the teachers and the requirements of the team leaders and structuring the data in an easy and accessible way, after which our scheduler creates a conflict-free schedule in less than a minute. The final schedule adheres to all requirements and aims to satisfy as much preferences as possible, while keeping the workload evenly distributed between the teachers. This Automated Educational Timetabling Software lightens the workload of the team leaders considerably.

The Customer

Our client was the Leiden University Faculty of Social Sciences, specifically the team leaders of the Psychology department. We would meet once every 2 weeks on average and discuss our progress and any additional requirements or requests they thought of in that time. After each meeting we discussed what we would work on before the next meeting and write down anything that needed to be emailed in that time. The communication with the client was good, albeit a bit challenging at times, because they did not have a technological background. Once we became aware of this, we were able to adjust accordingly and communication went smoother after that.

  • “Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.” – Helen Keller
The Team

In our team, Valeria Rezan was the Product Owner, and Marit Kraijenoord the Scrum Master. In the beginning, all team members were working on all parts of the project, but after a few weeks, some team members developed an affinity for certain aspects of the product, such as the algorithm or the UI. We would meet regularly, either online or in person, to work on our tasks together.

One of the challenges we overcame was communicating with a client without a technical background. We had to switch up our language and use more time to confirm whether they understood certain aspects. Additionally, we had to be clear near the end of the project what new features were feasible in the time left and what features were not. Additionally, the data we were given was very unstructured and we had to find a way to structure it to be able to work with it, but we also had to keep it easy to understand for our client.

We are very proud of the work we have put in over the whole semester, as we have been working very consistently since the beginning. Furthermore, we are very proud of our final product, as there were some challenges regarding the given data and requirements that only became clear at the end of the project, but we still delivered a functional and easy-to-use product.

The Technologies