IDMS Capstone: Working Through Shared Contracts

After presenting IDMS, our graduation capstone at Bahçeşehir University, I wrote about the people behind the system. Six of us built it together.

I led the backend architecture and, together with a teammate, worked on the data contracts between the software and AI sides. Those were the schemas where uploads, workers, retrieval, and citations had to line up.

The existing project overview introduces the system. This reflection is about a different part of the work: making components developed by different people agree about what they exchange.

A component can produce a result without making that result usable by the next component. The meaning of a field, the shape of a response, and the state represented by it all matter at the boundary.

That is why I described the contracts as shared work. They were not simply a backend detail or an AI detail. They connected responsibilities on both sides.

For me, the significant engineering effort was not one component in isolation. It was getting the parts to agree with one another so that they could form a coherent document workflow.

Leading one part of a project is not the same as building the whole project alone. My contribution depended on teammates carrying their own parts and on the guidance we received from our professors.

The presentation was a chance to recognize that collective work. The lesson I wanted to preserve was specific: when several people build one system, the interfaces between their contributions deserve as much attention as the contributions themselves.