Introduction Every semester, Johns Hopkins gets a new batch of students coming in who are U.S. and international citizens. New students coming to Johns Hopkins University have a tough time finding appropriate accommodation (new lease or sub-lease). The students do not have much information about which apartments are in the vicinity of the campus, the apartment availability, rent, reviews, amenities, utilities, the current state of the apartment, security concerns, etc. This lack of information leads to students not finding a suitable place to live which fulfils all/majority of their requirements and is a bang for the buck. Also, when new students come in, 50% of them tend to buy secondhand furniture and other household appliances. The only platform they can use for such transactions is Facebook Market Place which is also not that effective and safe. Adding to that, there is no official place to look for roommates for new students. People use messaging/mails to connect to potential roommates within their community.

Sprint Zero

As a team, we started to validate the problem statement by conducting user interviews to find out the challenges/pinpoints at Hopkins. Once we collected all the pinpoints, we defined our vision for the product (website). Our vision is to make the lives of the incoming & current students easy in terms of finding accommodation. As we went ahead in the process, we mapped out the feature list for the website which is as follows:

• Users should be able to post and read reviews/ratings about their housing experiences.
• Users should be able to use the forum for complaints/discussions about the housing.
• The application should be able to act as a logistic platform where users can post/share pictures and descriptions regarding their hand-me-down furniture, appliances, equipment, study materials, apparel, or any other miscellaneous items so that other users can check and buy them directly via the app.
• Users should be able to find potential roommates.
• Users should be able to put up their housing for sublease.
• Users should be able to book an online virtual tour of the new housing they are interested in so that they can check out the live status of the housing and check if it meets their needs.
• Users should be able to schedule meetings with landlords.

After the potential feature list for the product was created, we started to map the user journey and post that we utilized the Scrum methodologies to work on the project.

User Stories

Once we had a potential list of our desired features, we converted the same into the functionalities by utilizing the concept of user stories. This helped us articulate what value a product feature can bring and provided us with a better understanding of why users want a certain functionality. The user stories can be viewed in the attached excel sheet. After compiling the list of user stories, we focused on determining the “Acceptance Criteria” for each. Validating the acceptance criteria will be a key part of the development process and time will be allocated for fixing potential bugs.