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 will keep track of whether any changes have been made to an address book since it was last saved, and will 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 will need to meet the following quality requirements:.

• Performance: the software should respond to user requests at a speed equal to or better than competing applications, in any event not to exceed 500ms.
• Reliability: the system should enter and retrieve or exchange properly formatted address book data without loss or error.
• Standards: the address book software should ensure that data entered is consistent with U.S. postal address standards.
• Consistency: it should be possible to edit the name (or other fields) at any time while keeping the associated data.
• Ease of change: it should be possible to make likely changes to the system without extensive re-design. Simple changes should require changes to only a single system component (module).

Likely Changes

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. Ability to merge address books.
4. Support for user-defined fields.

Developmental Objectives

Speed of development, software quality, and flexibility of the design are paramount.

• It must be possible to divide the software into a set of distinct components that can be coded and tested concurrently.
• It must be possible to scale the delivered product to meet schedule.
• A bug-free application with reduced capability that is delivered to the market on time is worth more (and will get a better grade) than a buggy or late application with lots of features.
• Likewise, a design that allows for features to be added easily is superior to one that satisfies initial requirements but is difficult to extend.

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:

• Add an addresses to the address book
• Retrieve/view an address
• May use only a command-line interface (no GUI)

L1: Basic Address Book

• Simple address book version including
• Store standard postal address and one phone number
• Sort addresses by name or zip
• Edit, save, and recall addresses
• GUI for entering accessing address book operations

L2: Advanced Address Book

• Import/export standard-format (customer-defined) files of addresses
• Print an address in mailing-label format
• Support for two or more of the likely changes.

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.

Project 2: Choose a Project

The second project has two objectives:

• Demonstrate your grasp of Software Engineering principles and concepts
• Develop an open-source quality application that can be demonstrated or downloaded

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:

• An interesting idea for an application.
• Enough complexity that the project needs to be effectively modularized and developed concurrently among team members.
• Enough different capabilities that the project can be sensibly divided into increments. Each increment should represent a useful subset of the application capabilities so the team will have something to turn in even if every feature cannot be completed.
• Small enough scope that a complete set of development artifacts (project plan, ConOps, SRS, Architecture Specification, etc.) can be developed in addition to the code artifacts.

Project Ideas:

This term we are fortunate to have a number of project ideas available from the Student Contest on Software Engineering (SCORE) sponsored by the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). Review the abstracts and descriptions at the link above. These can be used in two ways:

1. Participate in the SCORE contest: the person sponsoring each project will act as a "customer" for teams wishing to enter the SCORE contest. Student teams can enter the contest and work with the sponsor. I will discuss this further with any interested teams.
2. Use the project idea: teams can also just borrow a project idea and create their own version for CIS 422.

Some of the projects that looked interesting to me include DRisk, Agile TweetViz, Distributed Software Development (topic of CIS 423), CodeCoach, and MeetMe. Note that the MeetMe project is sponsored by our own Prof. Michal Young. This would make the customer convenient but means the project could not be used to actually enter the SCORE contest due to conflict of interest.

Finally, a project idea of my own:

Project Team Sorting Hat

Does 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:

• Provide multiple input modalities like tablets or phones for questionnaires.
• Support drag-and-drop interface for rearranging teams
• Present several choices optimizing different parameters