Student Auction Mobile Application (STAUC)

Abstract

The Student Auction Mobile Application (STAUC) has been developed to be used by students intending to dispose of used items (but still in good condition) in order to make extra cash in the process. It was observed that there is currently no clear system used to sell off used items by university students and yet, in most cases, some items cannot be carried forward to the next semester of study while others are impossible to carry back home after completing studies and this is where STAUC comes in to help. We set on a journey to develop an application that can help students get extra cash from their used products by connecting them to potential buyers. The preexisting primitive means of selling items for example, posting advertisements on university notice boards which proofed to be a very inefficient way of selling commodities due to the multiple hiccups associated with it. A number of existing systems of auctions, both local and abroad, were reviewed in a bid to find out what was missing or what needed to be improved in them. Questionnaires, e-survey and interviews were used to find out the exact requirements needed to develop the system and these took place at Makerere University, which we used as our case study. The students provided us with adequate useful information that we used to develop our application. The system was implemented using the java environment in android studio and firebase, firestore and storage cloud as our servers. The application was thereafter tested and validated by first using the emulator, an android studio virtual tool that mimics a real mobile device. Later, a beta version of the app was distributed to a sample number of students to test its operation. At the end of this exercise, the app met all the intended requirements and all bugs were fixed.