Year in Review

To all our stakeholders in NITK,

It is now more than four years since IRIS was first hosted to handle a round of course registrations in early 2016. The fourth year of IRIS and co-incidentally our fourth year in NITK, was remarkable in many ways. IRIS has transformed from an academics centered software, to the likes of an Enterprise Resource Management(ERP) system digitizing various aspects of the institute’s functioning itself. The year saw us venturing out of our comfort zones taking up a diverse set of projects that branched out from the core IRIS application. The introduction of IRIS Labs, focused on research, artificial intelligence, and hardware projects, the development of an app for the Alumni Global Convention, undertaking the development of the institute website all attest to this era of diversification of reach. Another distinctive aspect of the year was the revamped approach of the product team and increasing the involvement of its members in the software development life cycle, with each product manager leading a functional sub-team focused on a project and seeing it to completion and release. On the technical front, we have been exploring quite a handful of open source projects that can assist the growth and scale of IRIS. The shift from native android development to the cross-platform Flutter framework which shall soon enable us to release Student and Faculty apps for Android and iOS, the experiments performed with the ElasticSearch stack, Hesk, Moodle, Koha, Kubernetes, Big Blue Button are just a few of the open-source projects that we are currently working with or have set up in the IRIS cluster. 

With the scale at which we operate now, ensuring maintainability for the years to come has proved to be the bigger challenge to tackle as opposed to the rapid development of new features. This year, we have tried to acknowledge this challenge and approached this by the systemic introduction of documentation standards not limited to code but also inclusive of aspects pre-development such as database schema design, software requirements specification and so on. A conscious effort has been made to ensure that all the actions required by the system are taken by the administrative authorities, gradually reducing the dependency on the development team for any process and procedure and increasing the autonomy of the users in achieving their desired results with the system. The intention of these efforts is to ensure that we are building a system that can last over the years.

Our initiatives such as the Code-In-10x Internship programs and Bootcamps for Ruby on Rails and Flutter have been well received by students, aiding them in navigating the wide and confusing world of software development. These programs have undoubtedly contributed to the strengthening of the team itself with the mentees, gradually being converted to recruits who have performed remarkably well in various projects. 

The campus lockdown gave us a fresh set of challenges as many of our on-going projects were brought to a standstill. At the same time, it presented us with a completely different set of problems to be tackled. Integrations with Microsoft Teams, Hosting an on-premise video lecture recording solution, collaborations with MOOC platforms like edx and Coursera were done swiftly, aiding NITK to quickly transition to this new mode of operation. The team still strives to make sense of these changes, and how it affects various functions and processes, regularly coordinating with the administration in all means possible to ensure that the pandemic does not bring NITK to a disadvantage. You would find us basking in the rare glory of these activities being featured on the national dailies, with the likes of The Hindu and The Times of India covering how the in-house portal of NITK has enabled flipped classroom teaching for the institute. 

Centre for Systems Design, the MIS Office, the Central Computing Centre, are entities that have played significant roles in the advancements we have made this year and we thank all the staff and faculty involved for backing us as we continue to make progress. On a personal note, I feel indebted to the proactive support of Prof Ananthanarayana VS (Deputy Director and Chairman, MIS), Prof K V Gangadharan (Coordinator, Centre for Systems Design) and Prof Mohit P Tahliani (Faculty Advisor, IRIS), who have directly contributed to ensuring that IRIS is ahead of the curve in every direction. The continuing contributions and the active involvement of our alumni mentors, Akshay Revankar of 2018, Salman Shah and Manish Kumar of 2019 have played a pivotal role in shaping IRIS this year, and this spirit of commitment towards the goal is something that IRIS greatly benefits from. We end this note, expressing our wholehearted gratitude to the Director, Deans, Registrar, Assistant Registrars, HoDs, the Students’ Council and the entire NITK community for its support, trust and the environment that enables us to build systems for the better. With this rock-solid support, there is only one way to go for IRIS, and it’s turning out to be up. 

Signing off,

Govind Jeevan
Team Lead (2019-20)

Pavan Vachhani
Team Lead (2019-20)

Projects Completed (2019-20)

Projects Under Development

Team: Organizational Chart

Team: Official List for 2019-20

* Only members who have achieved all of their target goals or released a module or have a minimum of 1 year of contribution are considered in the official list. Only contributions in the year 2019-20 are considered.

This annual report is dedicated to the Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL) of the IRIS Project.

Thank you

Govind Jeevan

Social Responsibility. Inherent Creativity. Technical Capability.