Executive Summary

The Department of Intercollegiate Athletics & Recreational Sports (IARS) provides athletic opportunities and support services each year for almost 1,000 student-athletes competing in intercollegiate sports. At the beginning of each academic year, the Compliance Office of the IARS Department collects student-athlete data by distributing paper-based forms to student-athletes who must complete and return them to the Compliance Office. Once these paper forms are collected, the data are manually entered into a database by Compliance Office staff members. The iars-bears Project Team from the School of Information Management and Systems undertook the challenge of designing a system that would convert this labor intensive, paper-based process into a streamlined, web-based application.


The project team began with a needs assessment phase and conducted several interviews with the Compliance Office supervisor and some staff. Subject matter experts on systems with functionality similar to that of the proposed application were also consulted. These interviews yielded a set of requirements that the team used to produced designs for both the information and technical architecture of the application. A prototype was developed to showcase core functionality while supplementary functionality was deferred to the next release. Finally, an evaluation plan was developed to gauge the functionality and usability of the implemented application.


This report is a compilation of all the information gathered and activities carried out by the iars-bears team to develop the CalStARS (Cal Student-Athlete Records System) application for the IARS Compliance Office. Its purpose is to document the software development process executed by the team and to provide all the necessary information for continued development of the CalStARS system upon delivery and transition to the client.