Coffee quality tracking system

Abstract

Since coffee produce is the major crop exported to other countries abroad from Uganda, it is important the quality of the coffee produced remains consistent. Some of the methods that have been introduced to improve the quality and consistency of coffee have not been successful eg visual inspection of the beans to determine quality, having manual methods of tracking coffee produce from the farmer to the consumer abroad like quality assurance programs that makes it cumbersome to identify good areas where good quality coffee is grown and identifying farmers who produce good quality coffee, etc. Our main objective was to develop a reliable, effective, efficient, and accurate Coffee Quality Tracking System (CQTS) to eliminate the challenges stated above. This system enables farmers to know who is buying their coffee and get in touch with consumers abroad, consumers to know which farmer produces good quality coffee and the government to know where to invest their money in high-quality coffee growing areas, for the Uganda Coffee Development Authority (UCDA) to easily provide resources to farmers, to prevent mishandling of the quality of coffee by middlemen thereby improving the security of the produce, automate some of the quality checking methods e.g color sorting making the process of quality checking a little faster and to accurately determine the supply chain mechanism of coffee produce from farmers to consumers abroad etc. A review and study of research work from external sources like articles, journals, internet that were related to the project were carried out to point out different views in relation to a Coffee Quality Tracking System (CQTS). For the success of this project, questionnaires, observation, and interviews were the techniques used to gather the requirements for developing a Coffee Quality Tracking System (CQTS). The requirements were analyzed and the system was designed using the context diagram, dataflow diagram and Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD), for process modeling and data modeling respectively. We gave a full description of the analysis and the design of a Coffee Quality Tracking System under which there were functional and non-functional requirements of the system as well as the design parameters. We gave an overview of the implementation, testing and validation of a Coffee Quality Tracking System (CQTS).