For the last few weeks a team of two students and I have been working on a Nurse Scheduling Program for a Software Design course taught here at Penn State. The point of this project was to implement a basic schedule solver and go through the general approach of enterprise-level application development.

We ended up developing a Java client-server program that can add, edit, and delete users, groups, shifts, and scheduling requirements. Much of this is done through the “light” client UI while the majority of computation and work is done through the server. This was done on purpose since our target deployment systems were low-end laptop computers. Another reason for the heavy server-side work was because the only measurable computing required was during schedule generation, which happens nightly at off-peak usage hours. Check out a video explanation of our work: (Note that this application is in beta and certain fields do not yet correctly populate)

For those interested, we attached our source-control system with SVNStat which outputs a nice little graph of our continuing work on the project, found here.