INFM 603
Information Technology and Organizational Context
Spring 2015
Assignment P3
Project Design

The goal of this document is to explain the design of your project in detail. This should be a near-final design, which means that you should already have substantial implementation done so that any need for refactoring will already have become apparent to you and will thus have already been done. The document should contain three key sections, each of which is 3-6 pages, including illustrations (with the document totaling no more than 15 pages, single spaced). You may wish to use UML where appropriate, but that is not required.

The first section should identify the requirements in detail. This should be based on the project plan that you submitted earlier, but of course if you have recognized a need to change the requirements you can do so here. The section should start by stating the goal, then one or more use scenarios should be described, and then the specific requirements should be listed. The specific requirements section should be organized in a manner that facilitates traceability, giving each requirement a unique code (e.g., A, B, ...). All requirements must be grounded in the user experience; implementation details do not belong in the requirements section. Your project will be graded based in part on its ability to meet the requirements that you state in this section, so in a sense you are writing your own grading criteria!

The second section should describe the implementation details. The section should begin with a description of the tools that you are using and an overview of your strategy for using those tools to create the user experience. The implementation of front end (display and control), back end (storage and access), and content (information sources and preprocessing) should then be described in turn. The section should conclude with a list of limitations on your ability to meet the requirements that result from implementation considerations. Note that you can have unmet requirements, so long as you specifically identify them as such, and so long as the things that you do implement represent a substantial learning experience that is commensurate with the mastery of the skills expected in this course and with the time available for your project. Again, you are defining the scope of work that will be graded here, so you should give serious thought to what you (now!) understand to be reasonable expectations.

The third and final section should describe the ways in which you plan to test your system. This section will not be graded, but it will give you an opportunity to think strategically about the role of testing during system development, and it is possible that obvious gaps in your testing strategy may give me ideas on some things that I should be on the lookout for when I try out the results of your project!

Add a link to this document to your project Web page.

Doug Oard
Last modified: Wed Jan 14 21:38:15 2015