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About the Engineering Digital Service

The Engineering Digital Service (EDS) is a team of students who develop and maintain Pinpoint as well as other digital services for the A. James Clark School of Engineering and the University of Maryland.

We're passionate about building digital tools that help elevate the experience of everyone in the greater university community and beyond. We place an emphasis on learning by doing and in teaching software engineering best practices to prepare students for the workforce. You won't find strict deadlines or performance metrics here. What you will find is a team of students who are eager to make an impact and learn while they work towards graduation. Our alumni have gone on to work at places like Google, Amazon, Meta, and some have even started their own companies.

As a member of the EDS, you'll get the opportunity to work on a wide variety of projects that impact the university and greater community. Occasionally, we'll take on projects that are in collaboration with external organizations. The projects we work on have real impact - you'll be able to see your work in action.

Our Structure​

The EDS is a part of the Clark School's Engineering Information Technology (EIT) department. We work in close collaboration with Terrapin Works, the University of Maryland's premier rapid prototyping organization.

We do project-based work; each project has a Team Lead who is responsible for managing the project, a set of stakeholders who provide feedback and requirements for the project, and a development team typically made up of 3-6 student engineers. The Team Lead is supported by Nicholas Bentley, who oversees the EDS.

Our stakeholders are invaluable to our success. They provide feedback and requirements for the projects we work on. They help us refine our work and ensure that we're building the right things. For example, the Singh Sandbox - as one of the largest makerspaces on campus - provides critical feedback in the development of Pinpoint, ensuring the system meets the needs of the makerspace community across campus.

Development Process​

Sprint Structure​

We operate on 4-week sprint cycles. At the end of each sprint, we hold a retrospective to:

  • Review completed work
  • Discuss what went well
  • Identify areas for improvement
  • Plan for the next sprint
note

Since our development team consists primarily of students, development activity fluctuates with the academic calendar. Development typically slows significantly or pauses during summer and winter breaks, depending on student availability.

Feature Prioritization​

Our development priorities are determined by several factors:

1. Critical Issues​

  • High and critical priority bugs are addressed first in each sprint.
  • Security vulnerabilities are treated with highest priority.
  • System stability issues are given immediate attention.

2. User-Requested Features​

We maintain a public feature request site where:

  • Users can submit new feature requests.
  • The community can vote on proposed features.
  • Comments and discussions help refine requirements.
  • Popular features are considered for upcoming sprints.

3. Stakeholder Requirements​

We work closely with key stakeholders to:

  • Gather requirements for new functionality.
  • Prioritize features critical to makerspace operations.
  • Address specific needs of the makerspace community.
  • Integrate feedback from makerspace administrators.

Development Pipeline​

  1. Planning

    • Feature selection from prioritized backlog
    • Requirements gathering and refinement
    • Technical design discussions

  2. Implementation

    • Code development
    • Internal code review
    • Unit testing
    • Integration testing

  3. Testing

    • Internal feature testing
    • Bug fixes and refinements
    • Performance testing
Future Improvements

We are currently working on implementing a formal User Acceptance Testing (UAT) process to:

  • Gather more structured user feedback.
  • Validate features meet user needs.
  • Identify usability issues earlier.
  • Improve overall user experience.

Getting Involved​

We value input from our user community. You can contribute to Pinpoint's development by:

If you're interested in joining the EDS to work on Pinpoint directly, check our open positions and apply!