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Overall Project Organization

We use the first 9 weeks of the term for design and construction of projects. Week 10 is reserved for final presentations. A more complete schedule is available.

Every team will work on two software projects. The first project is intentionally simple with respect to the code that must be developed; the goal is to allow team members to learn to work together, develop an understanding of the software development process, and get feedback on their work products. Feedback will be provided by peer-review as well as by the instructor. Students should complete Project 1 with a good understanding of the issues of collaborative software development and how these issues can be addressed through a disciplined software process.

Project 2 will be a more significant development effort that should produce a usable software application. Students may choose from among projects suggested by the instructor or may submit a proposal for a project of their own.

Project 1: A Simple Address Book

Objectives

For most teams, the hard part of this project will not be the coding, but organizing the team to work effectively together, and being clear on exactly what the team is building, in particular:

  1. Requirements: getting clear on precisely what the software should do and communicating this to all team members.
  2. Work Assignments: being precise about the tasks assigned to each person; exactly what is to be produced and when it is due.
  3. Iteration: building the code up as a sequence of meaningful subsets of the eventual functionality in a way that can easily be extended.
  4. Design: communicating the major software design decisions and their rationale.

The software to be designed is a program that can be used to maintain a simple address book. At a minimum, an address book holds a collection of entries, each recording a person's first and last names, address, city, state, zip, phone number and e-mail address.

Initial Requirements

It must be possible to add a new person to an address book, to edit existing information about a person, and to delete a person. It must be possible to sort the entries in the address book alphabetically by last name, or by ZIP code (with ties broken by first name if necessary).

It must be possible to create a new address book, to open an existing address book, to close an address book, and to save an address book to a file. File operations should be performed using standard New, Open, Close, Save and Save As ... File menu options. The program's File menu will also have a Quit option to allow closing all open address books and terminating the program.

Basic requirements call for the program to work with a single address book. A better implementation should allow for multiple address books to be open, each with its own window that can be closed separately. In this case, New and Open will result in creating a new window, without affecting the current window.

The program should keep track of whether any changes have been made to an address book since it was last saved, and offer the user the opportunity to save changes when an address book is closed either explicitly or as a result of choosing to create/open another, or quitting the program; i.e., it will not lose unsaved data without warning.

A more advanced implementation of the address book should support importing and exporting a set of addresses to other address books (e.g., to share addresses with another user). Import and export will be done using a standard, customer supplied, format (a TAB separated list of entry fields).

It is anticipated that the address book application will be routinely updated to add features, improve capabilities, or improve quality. It must be possible to extend and update the address book design as requirements change.

Quality Requirements:

A useful system must meet at least the following quality requirements:.

More Advanced Features (Likely Changes)

Once the basic functionality is implemented it is expected that the team will add one or more advanced features. The system should be designed so that such changes are easy to make. An advanced design will implement one or more of these features.

  1. As the number of entries gets larger, we will want to be able to search the address book.
  2. Ability to keep customized address books with different types of entries in each.
  3. Support for user-defined fields.
  4. Include links to social media like Facebook

Developmental Objectives

The first objective should be to build something the customer (played by the instructor) actually wants. In addition, speed of development and software quality are critical.

Suggested Subsets

Teams should employ an incremental development strategy that builds first an application with a small subset of the expected features. Subsequent increments should add additional features. Teams may decide which features to implement first but the following is a reasonable approach.

L0: Minimum Useful Subset

All teams should complete a minimum useful subset as follows:

L1: Basic Address Book

L2: Advanced Address Book

Constraints

It is required that at least two team members contribute to each of the significant artifacts. In particular, that two or more must contribute significantly to the code, work on the design, create the documentation, provide reviews, and test results. It should be clear from the schedule and developer log which team members contributed to each artifact.

Project 2: Choose a Project

The second project has two objectives:

For Project 2, teams will have a choice of projects. Teams may either implement one of the suggested projects or propose a project of their own. In either case, the team must submit a project proposal to the instructor. The proposal should be in the form of a draft ConOps document. Begin with a brief description, one page or less, then expand as needed. As usual, the draft ConOps should characterize the expected system capabilities from different user's perspectives. In addition, the proposal should make the case for why the project will be an effective vehicle for demonstrating the team's understanding of Software Engineering concepts covered in class. A good project idea will include:

If you are considering several ideas, feel free to send me an e-mail if you would like my feedback.

Project Ideas:

CIS Grad Student Web Portal (customer: Prof. Michel Kinsy)

This is a high priority for the CIS department. Good for any team with web chops, double for those interested in grad school.

The CIS department envisions a comprehensive CIS grad student portal that provides everything the student needs to know or keep track of during their studies. The goal of this project is just to start this development so others can continue building on it in the future. Requirements will be worked out with the project customer (Prof. Michel Kinsy). This will include an initial structure for a web site supporting a subset of functionality required by CIS grad students to track their progress. For example:

Project Team Sorting Hat

Feel like you got put in Siytherin but are a Hufflepuff at heart? Now you have a chance to build some software to fix the problem. Application, ideally, will do a better job than the instructor of creating project teams. Students fill out questionnaires on skills and preferences. Instructor defines sorting criteria and constraints (e.g., combining students with common programming language). The system would need to be secure against outside access of student information (quality requirement). Additional ideas:

Workout with Friends:

Fitness challenge app for portable device (phone, android, ipad, etc.). Users can create a circle of friends and compete in fitness activities (e.g., Crossfit challenges combining rowing, pullups, jumps, lifts, etc.). Can choose to compete by absolute score or (preferably) percentage improvements. Members can challenge friends to show they can do what they record (points transfer from loser to winner) or to do specific things. Additional ideas: