Abstract:

Introduction:
Vocational High School (VHS) apprenticeship programs combine work-based, on-the-job learning with relevant technical education in the classroom. Students who participate in these programs graduate with a high school diploma, earn college credits, and industry credentials. These programs in Greece are supported by a complex Management Information System (MIS), named “MATHITEIA”, built for the management of the whole lifecycle of Apprenticeships, starting from the provisions of apprenticeships positions by the businesses and public bodies, till the certification of participants. This MIS (https://e-mathiteia.minedu.gov.gr/) was designed, implemented and is operational under the CTI and Press “Diophantus”. Since 2019 has successfully supported three full cycles.

During these years, the development team constantly evolves the system’s architecture and functionality, in order to support the functional requirements modification or addition from cycle to cycle. Especially, during the pandemic era, quite a lot of the “fixed” initial specifications of the MIS changed and we had to adapt the MIS accordingly.

In this paper, we are going to present for each subsystem of the MIS, which user requirements, functionality or workflow changed among cycles, and how we adapted the architecture and the subsystems to address these changes.
We believe that the contribution of this paper will be valuable to system analysts, architecture designers and software developers of similar MISs, i.e. vocational training management systems, in order to build, evolve and maintain modern and flexible systems.

Requirement analysis and workflow differences among cycles:
“MATHITEIA” system adopts a modular architecture and consists of several individual subsystems, that adapt appropriately to the fluid requirements of each cycle. The main subsystems are: The User Management System, The Apprenticeships Management and Positioning System, The Applications System, Classes and Matching System, The Apprenticeship Monitoring System and The Reporting System.

In this section, we will discuss and outline which requirements per subsystem have changed and how they have affected the specifications of each subsystem and the workflow among them, during the last 3 years, including the abnormal period of covid-19.

Hybrid architecture based on Microservices and a core System for better adapting to requirement modifications:
In this section, we will present the software architectural patterns used by the development team, to adapt accordingly the “MATHITEIA” system and build an MIS as flexible as possible to future modifications. We will discuss how a hybrid agile architecture based on microservices around a “heavier” core monolithic system, can be an effective solution to real life projects, were requirements and specifications, especially in e-gov applications, can be volatile.

Keywords:

Apprenticeships, vocational training, requirements engineering, agile architecture, microservices.