Iterative Student-Centric Project Management for Sustainable Educational Software Development: A Hybrid Framework and Modular Implementation Guide

• Ruchika Sinha

  Author

Student-led open-source university software projects are cost-effective and provide authentic learning experiences, but often fail to survive long-term due to contributor turnover, weak institutional memory, insufficient documentation, and unclear governance structures. This work presents a project management framework for the design and evolution of extensible multi-campus educational software developed in an open-source environment initially by students. With UCLCampus, a hybrid mobile application developed for Catholic University of Louvain (UCLouvain), the framework provides an iterative structure combining Agile practices, modular architecture, automated knowledge management, and continuous deployment pipelines. The whole work is divided into five parts that contain a project charter and governance, modular architecture design, student sprints, knowledge offboarding automation, and feedback loop implementation. In every stage, there are practical checklists and measurable quality gates. Assessment of UCLCampus shows that contribution cycles are faster while documentation coverage exceeds 80% and contributors continue across years. The validation of a multi-campus orientation application involved twelve student teams, each delivering a functional product in one semester. None of the components of the application conflicted with others. The template repository, which is open source, contains modular architecture components, CI/CD configurations, and issue templates. The findings indicate that a student-driven project can sustain itself over time through codified governance, enforced modularity and automated knowledge preservation.

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