Recruitment Management System

Transcription

1 University Of Bordeaux 1 Internship Report Master of Software Engineering ( ) Recruitment Management System Student: Luong Vinh Phat Supervisor: Tran Kim Vu December 31, 2013

2 Abstract Recruitment is a process of using various manners to attract people with certain skills or knowledge from inside or outside of an organization. It s purpose is to find and select the best-qualified or skill-matching candidates. In reality, recruiting is not only by directly advertising, but also by referencing which means candidates are proposed by the internal personnels. Recruitment may require a lot of time and efforts for recruiters to complete the process from attracting to offering. So, a tool for managing recruitment turns out to be a need to facilitate the recruiting process and thereby saving resources. By spending the internship period at Global CyberSoft (Vietnam) JSC (or GCS for short), I joined a development team for the project Recruitment Management System (RMS). The project intends to build a recruiting application which will be used in the GCS internally. To work on it, I was responsible for developing software requirements and constructing the software. Thus, I have to research new technologies, directly contact the client to retrieve and analyze requirements, work by team and report my task status to the project manager. In this internship report, I would like to explain my work during the internship period by giving introduction to my results of technology research, and describing the software requirements and designs.

3 Contents 1 Introduction Global CyberSoft Internship Environment Technology Stack Spring Framework Java Persistence API (JPA) Jasper Reports Software Requirement Analysis Recruiting Process Management Tool CV Parser Non-functional Requirements Design and Implementation Software Design Software Requirements Specification Software Architecture Detailed Design Database Design Implementation Conclusion 28 Bibliography 28 1

4 List of Figures 2.1 Technology Stack used in the Project A modular architecture of Spring Framework A high-level view of how Spring works Life cycle of a Jasper report GCS Recruiting Process Candidate s status transition An extraction of features of RMS Basic flow of use-case Recruitment Report An illustration of the layered architecture of Domain Driven Design The software architecture of RMS Screenshot of a sequence diagram

5 List of Tables 2.1 Structure of a standard report Examples of statuses and their category A sample of Issue List

6 Abbreviations API CV DAO DDD GCS JDBC JSF JSP MVC ORM RMS SRS XML Application Programming Interface Curriculum Vitae Data Access Object Domain-Driven Design Global CyberSoft (Vietnam) JSC Java Database Connectivity JavaServer Faces JavaServer Pages Model View Controller Object-Relational Mapping Recruitment Management System Software Requirements Specification Extensible Markup Language 4

7 Chapter 1 Introduction Recruitment Management System (RMS) also known as a skill tracking and hiring tool, is a web-based software designed to track the employee skills, to automate and facilitate the hiring process. RMS allows recruiters to manage job positions, vacancies, applications, and status of a candidate through out the process from Available to Reviewing, Online Testing, Interviewing, Offering, and finally Hired. RMS is a project I have worked with during the internship period lasting from August 2013 to December 2013 at Global CyberSoft (Vietnam) JSC (GCS, for short). It was intended to be constructed for integrating to the current Human Resource Management System of GCS, so it is an internal use software that directly provides utilities for HR Recruiters (Human Resource Recruiters). This report presents my internship work. It is divided into five distinct chapters, the first giving an overview of the company and my work environment. The second chapter introduces three technologies used mainly in the project. Chapter 3 and 4 will deal with the project s specifics that are software requirements, software designs and implementation. Finally, chapter 5 concludes the report with my internship experience. 1.1 Global CyberSoft Global CyberSoft (Vietnam) JSC (or GCS) was founded in 2000 and based in California (USA). It is one of the leading software outsourcing service and IT solution providers in Vietnam. Globally, GCS operates in 18 countries and has local offices in the USA, Japan, and France. GCS specializes in IT solutions and services for various industry domains such as: Industry automation, Business automation, Embedded system, 5

8 Software testing, and ERP/MES/BI. With a vision and mission to become one of the top IT enterprises in Asia dedicated to the success of its worldwide clients, GCS has defined five Core Values which mainly focuses on the humanity, community and society inside and outside the company. Until now, GCS has over 120 customers and partners around the world, including Fortune 500 and leading companies in Japan, Europe, and Asia. Particularly, GCS Vietnam now employs more than 600 engineers that counting in both Ho Chi Minh and Da Nang branch. Some valuable achievements GCS Vietnam has obtained: ISO-9001 ISO CMMi level 5 SAP s Strategic Partner Sao Khue Award in 2012, 2013 Vietnam Gold Medal & Top 5 ICT Outsourcing Company in 2010, 2011 and Internship Environment ICT is name of one division of GCS Vietnam where I joined in to conduct my internship. The sub-team that I have worked with for the project RMS has 4 members including me, and they are all specialized in Java programming language. Before starting to work, the policy of Security and IP (Intellectual Property) protection is very important. All the employees are required to learn and strictly follow it. To be more specific, there are five categories that form IP Protection System: Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDA) Protection of Data, Information and Documents Protection of Customer Property and Production Related Assets Complying with Licensed Software and Open-source Software Audit and Corrective Actions of violations 6

9 Regarding Security, the company established the ISMS (Information Security Management System), which is a system that is implemented to protect information from a wide range of threats in order to ensure business continuity, minimize business risk, and maximize return on investments and business opportunities. The key areas and policies of ISMS include: Corrective and Preventive Actions Asset Management Policy Human Resource Security Policy Access Control Policy Information Systems Acquisition, Development And Maintenance Policy Backup and Recovery Policy Software Control Policy Compliance Policy So, to follow up the aforementioned policies, I have worked with a licensed Microsoft Windows 7, and free or open-sourced softwares and tools such as: Eclipse IDE, OpenOffice, StarUML, Tortoise SVN, Notepad++/GVIM Editor, Jasper ireport, Thunderbird, etc. Besides that, because OpenOffice is not fully compatible with Microsoft Office file formats, it is necessary to use only Microsoft Office to save changes if any modifications on the project files are made. Thus, I and the team members were given permissions to using Remote Desktop tool to remote to one of the 4 servers that were preinstalled the licensed Microsoft Office Relating to the hardware, personal laptop is not allowed here. USB is forbidden to use, any page of online storages have been blocked and uploading of any exceeding 200 KB (Kilobyte) files is violating the policy. Finally, there are some common rules: Ready to work at 9AM. Daily meeting/report tasks status and update on JIRA (a project tracking system). Inform the project manager coordinator in advance for vacation leave. 7

10 Chapter 2 Technology Stack In this chapter, I will introduce the main technologies used to implement RMS. This include Spring Framework, Java Persistence API, Log4j, JUnit and Jasper Report. The below figure depicts the whole technology stack for the project. Figure 2.1: Technology Stack used in the Project Before the coding phase beginning, I and the team have been assigned to learn these technologies by ourselves. What we had to do to prove that we basically understand them and successfully catch the main idea of the technologies, was every team members present their output just like in a knowledge sharing meeting. In this section, I will go through three parts to briefly introduce what I have learned from the researching. 8

11 2.1 Spring Framework Spring is an open source Java platform that was created to support developing modern Java-based enterprise applications. Spring aims to help structure the applications by declaring them as a set of components and putting them together in a consistent, productive manner. By that way, Spring handles the infrastructure so developers can focus on their applications. Spring Framework Architecture The Spring Framework is a layered architecture consisting of seven modules which can be used independently based on the requirement of applications. This means that Spring Framework allows developers to choose and apply individually the modules which are applicable to them. The seven modules are shown in the following figure 1. Figure 2.2: A modular architecture of Spring Framework Spring Core provides the fundamental functionalities of the using to the rest Spring modules. As the name suggests, the Core module is the heart of the framework. In addition, the core also defines how beans are created, wired together, configured, and managed. Beans are objects or components that make up an application. Simply speaking, in the sense of Spring, a bean is nothing but just a POJO 2 (Plain Old Java Object) class that is serializable. Serializable In computer engineering, an object is serializable if it is able to be transformed into a data stream that can be stored and reconstructed to the original form later in the same or different platform. The latter is de-serializable. 1 Content of the figure credits to 2 POJO definition from Wikipedia: 9

12 Spring Context module provides configuration information (the context) to the framework. A context can be configured by using an XML-based configuration file, or by coding. The Spring Context provides services like JNDI, internalization, validation, etc. Both the modules Spring DAO and Spring ORM are for Data Access/Integration. The Spring DAO provides a JDBC-abstraction layer, and the Spring ORM provides integration layers for object-relational mapping APIs. The Spring Web is a web-oriented module. It is built on top of the Context module, providing basic utilities for Web-based applications, and also providing integration points with other frameworks like Struts and JSF. The Web module doesn t provide an MVC implementation, but the Spring MVC does. Spring MVC separates the roles of the controller, the model and the presentation or view which makes them loosely-coupled. Regarding the presentation layer of the web application, JSP is not the only way to provide the view, but the other frameworks or templates such as JSF, XSLT, Facelets, velocity, etc are also applicable. How Spring works As we know that, the Spring container is at the core of Spring Framework. It uses Dependency Injection (DI) pattern to manage lifecycle of the components that make up an application, which are Spring beans, from start to end. First, the Spring container reads context configuration metadata of the application and decides what objects to instantiate, configure, and assemble. Then, the container opens up lifecycle of the Spring beans by combining the POJO classes with the metadata. Finally, what we achieve from the previous phase is a fully configured and executable application. The following figure provides a high-level view of how Spring works 3. 3 The original image comes from 10

13 Figure 2.3: A high-level view of how Spring works The steps above also draws out definition of Spring container. A container is a component that can contain other components, and a Spring container does more on its responsibilities so that it manages the components inside itself. 2.2 Java Persistence API (JPA) The Java Persistence API or JPA, is a Java specification for manipulating data (CRUD - Create, Read, Update, and Delete) between Java objects and a relational database. JPA is just a set of interfaces, and requires an implementation. There are some Java frameworks that are implementations of JPA, for example, Hibernate, EclipseLink, DataNucleus, etc. Hibernate has been a popular choice for other projects of the company, so it was chosen just like following a standard. 2.3 Jasper Reports ireport Designer is the tool I have used to design reports for the project. The other relating product like JasperSoft Studio and JasperReports Server and ireport Designer itself use JasperReports Library as their core engine. It is of the best open-sourced Java report engine. To begin, I quoted here a text taken from JasperSoft community website 4 about JasperReports Libary: 4 JasperReports Library, an open source Java reporting library. 11

14 The JasperReports Library is the world s most popular open source reporting engine. It is entirely written in Java and it is able to use data coming from any kind of data source and produce pixel-perfect documents that can be viewed, printed or exported in a variety of document formats including HTML, PDF, Excel, OpenOffice and Word. What is Report A report is a document containing information that describes the analysis results of a specific subject or problem. A report may be organized in tabular form, text or graphic. The meaning of a report is to provide summarized information or analyzes. In terms of Report I am speaking here, a report is produced using data from a database which can be a database engine or a file. The output basically follows a template or a layout. Structure of a report Generally, a report layout consists of three main areas: a page header, page footer, and the body. The following layout is common and followed to generate reports by many of the commercial report generating tools. Title Page Header Column Header Detail Column Footer Page Footer Summary Table 2.1: Structure of a standard report It is possible to have 7 sections or bands in a report. Each band has its particular location, size and can contain components. The table below is the description of each element mentioned above: 12

15 Element title page header column header detail column footer page footer summary Description Title contains the title of the report which appears at the very beginning of the report. Page header appears at top of each page. Column header is placed below the page header band. It can be set to appear on each page or just the very first page. The purpose of this band is to provides description of what being reported. This band is displayed for each record row in the data source. If the data being reported floods the current page, a new page is created. Column footer may display summation of any of the columns. Page footer may contain page count information. It appears at the bottom of each page. Summary is at the last page and appears only once. Besides the above bands, we have concepts of Report Group, thus it generates Group header and Group footer. The idea of Report Group is to combine record rows which have the same provided factor. The common factor when using Report Group is the IDs (Identifier). Jasper Report life cycle The following flow chart illustrates a typical work flow while creating reports. 13

16 Figure 2.4: Life cycle of a Jasper report The life cycle has 3 distinct phases: 1. Design phase: Output of this phase is a JRXML file which is just a XML document. We can use any text editor to create this file or a simpler way is to use ireport Designer so that we can design it visually. A JRXML is just a text file, it must be compiled in an executable binary object called a Jasper file (*.jasper). 2. Execution phase: The report execution is performed by passing a Jasper file and a data source to JasperReports. There are plenty of supported types of data sources, for instance, data retrieved from an SQL (Structured Query Language) query or an HQL (Hibernate Query Language) query, an XML file, etc. And even a custom data source is possible if none of the provided ones be able to serve your need. 3. Export phase: Your final document is generated in this phase with a preselect file format. ireport Designer As being aforementioned, ireport Designer allows you design your reports visually. Indeed, it can assist you during all the phases of the report development: JRXML design, Jasper compilation, report execution, and document export. ireport Designer can be found and download at homepage of the tool Homepage of ireport Designer: 6 At the time I was writing this report, the tools has been renamed to Jasper Studio starting from version

17 Chapter 3 Software Requirement Analysis Domain knowledge represents your understanding of the business, the process or a set of constraints of the organization you are building software for. The knowing in-depth of business helps us address features or functions of the software easily. In this chapter, I m introducing the GCS s recruiting process in general, and describing the functional requirements of the RMS. Before doing that, I would like to give some key definitions as below: Candidate is a person seeking or being considered for some kind of position. Position is a role of an individual in a society/company. Vacancy is a position offered by a business that wishes to hire a worker. Application refers to the connection between a candidate and a vacancy (or an application without a vacancy). Skill is the abilities that one possesses. Skill is divided into: domain-specific skills, soft skills and language skills. 3.1 Recruiting Process The process can be divided into 4 domains. First, Human Resources or Vice Presidents will analyze the need for recruiting which includes identifying job s requirements, how many available vacancies for an opening position. The second is to plan the recruiting which is carried out by Human Resource Manager. Follow that, recruiters will execute the plan to recruit applicants. This is the part that we are interested in to learn domain knowledge and to analyze requirements for the RMS. Finally, Line Manager will evaluate and select the appropriate applicants base on their performance after testing or interviewing, and then hire them. The figure below depicts GCS recruiting process. 15

18 Figure 3.1: GCS Recruiting Process A State Transition Diagram (STD) was used to make the overview of recruiting process to be more detail. There are five phases in the process, which are Select Candidates, Manager Review, Test and Interview, Offer, and Hire, and three roles have their own actions at each phase: Manager, Recruiter, and Candidate. The figure below summarizes the status changing of a candidate throughout the process from Select Candidates to Hire. Figure 3.2: Candidate s status transition 16

19 A candidate holds a status when moving from one to another state and so are job positions, vacancies, applications, reasons, to name a few. Resource Pool is a place where candidates do not keep any status but still be available for being searched for. Some examples of status: Type Candidate Status Vacancy Status Position Status Application Status Value CANDIDATE_STATUS_011 = Created CANDIDATE_STATUS_031 = Inactive CANDIDATE_STATUS_092 = Closed VACANCY_STATUS_011 = Created VACANCY_STATUS_021 = Approved VACANCY_STATUS_031 = Disapproved VACANCY_STATUS_041 = Openning VACANCY_STATUS_051 = Pending VACANCY_STATUS_091 = Closed POSITION_STATUS_011 = Created POSITION_STATUS_021 = Active POSITION_STATUS_031 = Inactive POSITION_STATUS_091 = Closed APPLICATION_STATUS_012 = HR Reviewed Unsuitable APPLICATION_STATUS_021 = Manager Reviewing APPLICATION_STATUS_031 = Manager Reviewed Suitable APPLICATION_STATUS_032 = Manager Reviewed Unsuitable APPLICATION_STATUS_041 = Online Test Scheduling APPLICATION_STATUS_042 = Online Test Rejected APPLICATION_STATUS_043 = Online Testing APPLICATION_STATUS_044 = Online Tested Passed APPLICATION_STATUS_045 = Online Tested Failed APPLICATION_STATUS_046 = Online Tested Failed Mailed APPLICATION_STATUS_051 = Interview Confirming APPLICATION_STATUS_052 = Interview Rejected APPLICATION_STATUS_053 = Interviewing Table 3.1: Examples of statuses and their category To what extent, we learned the recruiting process which allows us to imagine how the software will look like. But this is just a big picture of the whole. The recruiting tool here should not to be an Employee Management System, so it ought to focus on the feature of managing and tracking employee s skills. In addition, the tool may allow its users to import CV from the applicants. The whole system can be described as 2 main modules: Management Tool and CV Parser. 3.2 Management Tool The management tool is a web-based software application which will provide its users the ability to manage job positions, vacancies and recruiting status of applicants. 17

20 The tool can be divided into modules and their sub-modules, such as Manage Positions, Manage Candidates, Manage Resumes, Manage Vacancies, Manage Applications, Statistics Dashboard, Report, User Management, etc. The figure below is an extraction from the feature matrix table: Figure 3.3: An extraction of features of RMS 3.3 CV Parser This is a C++ utility which helps recruiter parse, capture information and import applicants CV into the system. It is not standalone tool but integrated into the management part which is usable by the module Manage Resumes. 18

21 3.4 Non-functional Requirements The RMS application will be accessed via web browsers, so there are some non-functional requirements to ensure its usability. For example: Hundreds s send out the same time Running well on IE, Chrome, FireFox Simple and user friendly 19

22 Chapter 4 Design and Implementation 4.1 Software Design Joined the RMS Project, I took a role as a Business Analyst and a Developer for the module Management Tool. Therefore, my work was to read and review software prototypes, business flows, existing documents and then newly develop or update the specifications, designs, and finally translating or mapping designs to code. During the period of reviewing documents, my team were responsible for writing down questions, opinions, or suggestions to a common file, and then relevant people answer them by updating the file. This is one of many proposed manners to clarify problems, but it is good for tracking down things. Indeed, Software Requirement Specifications (SRS) is an output of the analysis phase of the standard software development process, but I put it in this section to make my flow of writing being continuous. The first part I m going to present is the SRS Software Requirements Specification A Software Requirements Specification (SRS) describes the essential behavior of a software product or system to be developed from a user s point of view 1. An SRS may be written in plain text, or illustrated by using graphic. The latter is what we called ScreenSpec. In addition, the SRS may contain non-functional requirements such as performance engineering, security, running environment, quality standards, or design constraints. Actually, we didn t start developing use-cases from scratch, but inherited the previous work with over 30 described use-cases. We use Excel files following standard templates of GCS to write the SRS. This document contains the definition of glossaries, lists all messages used in the system, business rules and describe in detail the use-cases including their basic flows, and alternative 1 A definition of Software Requirements Specification from 20

23 flows. Basically, more than 50 use-cases have been documented in total. Below, I list out one basic flow sample from the use-cases I developed. Figure 4.1: Basic flow of use-case Recruitment Report To evaluate correctness of the SRS, we are required to fill in the Review Checklist for Software Requirement Specifications, and joined review meeting with attendance of the project manager, business analyzers and some team leaders. The checklist is a document contains check points with the Yes/No answer. Checklist is applied for all use-cases Software Architecture Domain-Driven Design (DDD) is not a new concept in software engineering. However, DDD is not quite widely applied in the internal GCS itself. Be aware of the advantages of DDD, they have tried to bring it in some real projects and have got some success from it. To get more practices, DDD was introduced to the project Recruitment Management System. Before reading and modifying the software design, my team was trained about what DDD is and the DDD-based architecture that will be applied. In this part, I will give the definition of DDD and its layered architecture. 21

24 Domain Driven Design According to Wikipedia English, Domain Driven Design (DDD) is an approach to develop software for complex needs by connecting the implementation to an evolving model 2. DDD is neither a technology nor methodology but a collection of principles and patterns. It provides a structure of practices and terminology for making design decisions that focus and accelerate software projects dealing with complicated domains. What we get from properly applying DDD is the abstraction of the domain which is called domain models. These models encapsulate complex business logic, closing the gap between business reality and code. Some key concepts of DDD are: Domain, Model, Context, Ubiquitous Language. The main goal of Ubiquitous Language is to facilitate communication between the roles in the development process, such as domain experts, designers and developers. In the book Domain-Driven Design [3], the navigation map of the language of Model- Driven Design shows the most important patterns to be used in model-driven design and the relationships between them whose purpose is to present some of the keys elements of object modeling and software design from the viewpoint of domain-driven design [1, pp. 28]. As such, the model-driven design will isolate the domain using a layered architecture to maintain the correspondence between model and implementation. And the model is expressed with Services, Entities, and Value Objects. Layered Architecture The architecture of a software design can be partitioned into multiple layers, and the common solution for domain-driven designs contains four conceptual layers: User Interface, Application, Domain, and Infrastructure. Figure 4.2 taken from the book of Eric Evans [3] shows the interactions between four layers: 2 Definition of Domain-Driven Design on Wikipedia: 22

25 Figure 4.2: An illustration of the layered architecture of Domain Driven Design User Interface or Presentation Layer is responsible for providing medium to interactions between the user and the application or system. Application Layer holds the state of an application task progress. It neither contains business logic nor holds the state of the business objects. Domain Layer is the backbone of the enterprise application. It contains information about the domain, which is domain entities, and holds the business logic. Infrastructure Layer supplies utilities that support the higher layer. It may also support the interactions between the four layers. RMS s Architectural Design The architecture that RMS is following is based on the pattern of Domain Driven Design. Generally, it was divided into 4 layers: Presentation, Application, Domain, and Infrastructure. Each of them are exposed as services. Figure 4.3 shows this architecture. Just one note that Data Services, which provides an abstraction of data persistence technology, is a part of the Infrastructure. We separated it out from the Infrastructure to clearly show the interaction flow between layers. 23

26 Figure 4.3: The software architecture of RMS Detailed Design Detailed Design is a step that produces Software Architecture Document (SAD) which is a document containing description of the software architecture, including major software components and their interactions. An SAD also may include specifications of the hardware and software platform on which the system is built and developed. SAD aims to provide information that is complementary to the code. To design, we used StarUML 3 which is an open source modeling tool supporting UML. Comparing to the other tools that I have used, StarUML is far more better than ArgoUML 4 in my opinion. StarUML provides more features and formatting options which allows me to design with ease. Most activities of the design phase were to draw sequence diagrams based on the software requirements and software architecture. This is not easy for whom doesn t have much experience in coding, because he or she must define which classes, interfaces, 3 Homepage of the modeling tool StarUML is available from 4 Homepage of ArgoUML: 24