A web platform to support mentoring programs in higher education

Mentoring Academy is a program which aims to integrate students of the Instituto Politécnico de Braganca in the academy through peer mentoring and peer tutoring. This program needed an application that permits its execution. Motivated by this demand, we aimed at proposing a web application that complies with the Mentoring Academy requirements. The system requirements were defined together with the program stakeholders. Based on the literature review, we opted for the technologies ASP.NET Core and MySQL, for the backend, and Angular 6, for the frontend. Subsequently, the system architecture was planned. SCRUM methodology was used in the application development, with biweekly meetings with the stakeholders to evaluate what was done and to define the efforts for the following fortnight. Eighteen features were developed and four were presented in this paper. Finally, the system was deployed on a Linux server provided by the Instituto Politecnico de Braganca, allowing it to be tested and later used by the Mentoring Academy users. Approximately 61% of the functional requirements defined in the system modeling were developed (23 out of 38) and some functionalities not previously defined were also implemented. The units tests developed for the web application proved promising in terms of components generation and HTTP request services, both exception-free. That said, the system provides students' integration, permitting them to have socio-academic inclusion and support in curricular units.