How this tool would be helpful?Income tax calculator is very useful tool for every day users. Every one of us need to calculate our payable tax each year. This task become much more complicated when we have different sources of income and each has different rule from income tax department.
For Whom : This project idea is for
Computer Science(CS) and
Information Technology (IT)Students.
Level : Easy How to build it ?As always to build any software project , we will follow water fall model as you have studied in Software engineering class :
Requirement Analysis :This is one of the most step for any computer science project. In this step we find out complete requirement for this project including customer's requirement and software requirements. Very important questions such as Why we need this particular project? Who are end users? Things like that should be answered in this step.
DatabaseWe will database to store user information, tax rules information and stuff like that. For this project we will use Mysql as our database engine.
Which type of Application it is going to be?We are going to make it a web application because this application needs regular updates about the IT rules and if we made desktop application , it would be extremely difficult for us to update the database of each and every customer.
With the help of web application users from different countries can use it without worrying about updating it manually because administrators of this application would keep on updating and adding new rules whenever applicable.
Programming Language:After knowing that it is going to be web application it is easier to decide that it is going to be php application. There are two reasons behind my selection :
First, PHP is very popular language and free books and tutorials are easily available online.
Second its free, PHP is open source language so that its totally free to use and it gets updated time to time with better functionality.
I have discussed some points for our planning phase but you can add many more details in requirement analysis , because bigger it is , better your software will be.
Design :There is going to be two sections for our income tax calculator :
Administration Section : Owner of the application can edit the income tax rules and modify the data such as rates which is necessary.
User Section : Where user can select his or her country or state, so correct tax rules can be applied for his tax form. After that there would be income form to be filled ,which eventually gives user total amount of tax to be paid.
You will need pencil and blank papers for this section , draw design of all the pages which are required , draw form , its label , specify where you need text field, radio button or combo box.
Implementation :Download Wamp server and start working with the help of simple notepad. To code you should have good knowledge of php , read some free tutorials on internet if you don't have that.
Verification :
Software testing can be stated as the process of validating and verifying that a software program/application/product:
- meets the requirements that guided its design and development;
- works as expected; and
- can be implemented with the same characteristics.
There are three types of testing whose explanation is out of the scope of this post but you can read more about them by clicking on links below :
1
.White Box Testing2.
Black Box Testing3
.Grey Box Testing.Maintenance :Software's are never complete there is always scope for improvement. So, our income tax calculator too needs continuous upgrade for new features and technology.
For your help you can download source code and application itself from the links below : Income Tax Calculator :OpenTaxSolver : Open Source Income tax calculator written in C
TaxMagic :A simple open source/free software tax calculator written in .NET
Tax Estimator :U.S. Federal personal income tax estimates using the RushTaxOS taxEngine.
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