Contact: Bob Ratliff
When Susan Oxford enrolled in CS 6253 at Mississippi State University, she was looking for more than academic credit toward a master's degree in computer science.
Oxford and her husband Emry [cq] own and operate Prime Care Nursing in Greenville. Their business employs about 800 nurses who provide home health care and supplemental staffing for health-care facilities statewide.
Keeping track of several hundred people working different shifts from Memphis to the Gulf Coast is a monumental task--one Susan Oxford decided could best be managed with Internet-based computer software.
She approached Ray Vaughn of MSU's computer science department with the idea. The associate professor suggested that she enroll in his software engineering class and build the software she needed as a class project.
"Supplemental staffing for hospitals is sort of like a 'temp' service," Susan Oxford said. "However, it's different in that a call can come two hours before a shift starts and we probably can locate someone to come in and work.
Oxford commutes two or three time a week during the fall and spring semesters from her Washington County home to the Starkville campus. "Dr. Vaughn likes to do real-world projects," she said. "He assigned students to different teams, with three others working with me on the software I need."
Oxford and fellow graduate students Jonathan E. Hardy, Yuzhong Shen and Kalyana C. Vullaganti developed a scheduling system than lets Prime Care nurses check schedules from any computer connected to the Internet. Hardy is from Wiggins; Shen and Vullaganti, Starkville.
The scheduling system was inaugurated this summer. "We can look at information about shifts and see whether or not they are filled," Oxford explained, adding that the site can be updated from Prime Care offices in both Greenville and Magee.
Vaughn, a 20-year veteran of software engineering for industry and government, said Oxford's request was a perfect fit for the course he first taught during the 1999 spring semester.
"Many problems that occur in software engineering really are problems in dealing with customers and understanding customer requirements," he said. "To teach students about dealing with those kinds of problems, it's important to have a 'real' customer."
Vaughn said the Prime Care project demonstrates the importance of a company's day-to-day involvement with its customers. "A project goes much more smoothly than if you only come back periodically to visit with the customer and demonstrate the program," he observed.
Other Vaughn class teams helped develop software for MSU's popular dairy products sales store, as well as for the University Florist and offices of Research and Technology Transfer.
"We try to use real-life examples and pressures and to stay away from theory and contrived examples," Vaughn said.
Vaughn said he welcomes additional opportunities that offer his software-engineering students the opportunity to continue their "real-world" training.