Product Requirements Document

1. Product overview

The Student Counseling Feedback and Outcome Tracking System is a role-based web application for coordinating student counseling requests and managing school room/laboratory use. It gives students and school staff a shared place to request or schedule counseling, record room use, and review relevant history.

This document describes the capabilities present in the current application. It is not a commitment that unimplemented ideas are already available.

2. Problem and objectives

Schools need a consistent way to coordinate counseling appointments and know which rooms are occupied. Manual coordination can make it difficult to see the current room state, identify active sessions, and retrieve past usage.

• Let students request counseling sessions and let authorized staff schedule and manage them.
• Show current room availability and prevent conflicting active room-use sessions.
• Keep searchable room-use history and provide administrators with operational reports and audit records.
• Provide a responsive, authenticated interface for students and school staff.

3. Users and permissions

• Students: view the dashboard and room history, start/end their own room-use sessions, submit counseling requests, use the feedback preview, and manage their profile.
• Teachers: use shared room workflows and schedule counseling sessions for students and manage session status.
• Staff: use room workflows and other pages permitted by their account role; counseling scheduling and status management are available to administrators and teachers.
• Administrators: manage student records, reports, audit trail, and database backup/restore, in addition to shared workflows.

4. Product scope and functional requirements

• Authentication: users sign in with their school identifier and password; authenticated pages require a session.
• Counseling: a student can submit a request for a future appointment and cancel an eligible pending request. Authorized staff can schedule appointments for students and update session status.
• Room management: users can begin and end room/lab use with a purpose. A room cannot be assigned to a second active session, and a user cannot hold multiple active sessions.
• Availability and history: active use updates room availability; completed sessions record end time and duration. Users can search/filter usage history and see current activity.
• Administration: administrators can manage student records and room settings, review reports and audit entries, and create or restore additive database backups.
• Requirements documents: visitors can open this PRD and the Technical Requirements Document directly; signed-in users can also access them from Help in the application navigation.

5. Quality requirements

• Security: restrict protected pages by authentication and role, use server-side validation, and protect applicable state-changing requests against cross-site request forgery.
• Usability: provide clear status, success, and error messages and preserve a responsive layout for common screen sizes.
• Integrity: persist core records in MySQL and use transaction-safe operations for workflows that update related records.
• Maintainability: keep the application deployable as a conventional PHP project with a documented database configuration.

6. Out of scope and known limitations

• The feedback form is currently a preview; it does not persist or submit feedback.
• A devices table exists in the database, but the current navigation and application do not provide a complete device-registration workflow.
• The application does not currently define external calendar, email, SMS, or single-sign-on integrations.
• Automated appointment reminders, public self-registration, and mobile-native applications are not included in the current product.

7. Acceptance criteria

• A visitor can open both requirements documents without a login, and signed-in users can also reach them using Help navigation.
• A student can create a future counseling request and see its status; authorized staff can manage session status.
• A room-use session updates room state and is reflected in the usage history; duplicate active use is rejected.
• Administrative reports, audit, and backup/restore actions remain restricted to authorized administrators.
• The pages display accurately on desktop and narrow/mobile viewports.