Horse Show Administration Program Improvements; Bringing Smart Parking Technologies of Hangzhou to Charlottesville

The technical portion of this thesis documents the process of taking an existing software development project and building off of it to create a feature rich, efficient, and bug free program. The previous group’s software was created to streamline horse show administration by creating digitized entry forms to replace handwritten posters and charts, though it contained some bugs and inefficiencies that ultimately made it too slow to use in an actual horse show. Our group of five took on this project and worked with the same local residents the previous team developed for to create a better product that they could use in actual horse show administration. We held biweekly meetings with them and our capstone advisor to provide status updates on fixes and new features for the software. We developed an efficient and organized workflow with tools such as JIRA and Git, and we created documentation throughout the project to describe the process in organizing our team, setting up a server to host the software, and testing our code. These documents would then be used by our capstone advisor as an example to direct future groups so they can create better projects. The STS portion of this thesis analyzes the parking situation in the city of Charlottesville, Virginia as well as in Hangzhou, China to determine if Hangzhou’s smart parking technologies can be implemented in Charlottesville. Both cities are reviewed to see what their current parking issues are in addition to their plans for future improvements. Hangzhou is a densely populated metropolitan city that serves as a good example for the parking issues that can arise in an urban environment, so analyzing its parking infrastructure and its integration with smart technology can possibly improve Charlottesville’s parking systems in the same manner. The technical and STS theses are unrelated.