Journal Entry: Plan and Process

Journal entry assignment three asks you to discuss your plan for getting code done and integrated into your system. Please discuss how you will approach the problem of fulfilling requirements and what process you will use. How will you keep on track and avoid procrastination? How will you motivate your teem to do the same. Please be specific about your strategy, and identify how you utilise or contradict the ideas from existing process frameworks (Agile or RUP for example).

... due Thurday Oct 5

Assignment 3: Proposal Revision & Presentation

The next assignment involves revising and polishing your proposal. It will be due Tues 12 Sep. On this date you should also have a short, 7 minute presentation describing the project. This will be done in front of the class, and each presentation will be critiqued. There are some common issues with all of the proposals, be sure to address these in your revision:

• Always have someone else read your proposal! Ask someone to give you feedback and explain your project to you. This will help you identify holes or unclear explanations.
  
• Avoid informal language, like "you" and "I". These can be directly substituted with "one" and "we". Imagine that the document speaks for you and your "company", rather than it being written by you.
  
• Background, background, background. Be sure to do your due diligence in finding competing work. It will be rare that you have truly novel idea, who else thought of it?
  
• Make strong points. Avoid weak or self deprecating comments. This document should convince me that you are the right person/team for the job.
  
• Avoid too much internal detail in system description. Your description should be detailed, but only with respect to system boundaries. Delving into specifics about its implementation will confuse the reader, and in many cases make the system seem fuzzier rather than more concrete. Focus on aspects of the description from an "outside" point of view.
  

Also, make sure that you have reasonable section headings, your cover sheet is only one page and contains your contact info, if you have an itemized budget be sure that it has a total at the bottom. You should go back through the assignment 1 description, and make sure you have addressed each of the topics. Your grade on this project will depend on the amount of improvement when compared to the draft you just submitted.

Journal Entry 2: Modeling and Rationale

Now that you are working on a more detailed proposal, I would like you to pick one aspect of your project and sketch a UML model of it. I want the journal entry to record how this model changed as you completed the sketch, and how it changed the proposal that you are writing. Refer to Chapter 12, Rationale, for some things to think about when discussing the changes that happened; what were the issues, alternatives, criteria, arguments, and decisions you made? Aspects of the project that you can model include, tasks (timeline), the user interface, the data model, etc. If this approach is helpful in the creation of your proposal, consider modeling multiple aspects; think about how these models interact.

Due Thursday Sept 7.