Creating a Software

Project Deliverables The project has several intermediate and final deliverables, with deadlines that span across the semester: Software Requirements Specification Software Design Document Test Plan Intermediate Prototype Demonstration Project Presentation Final Software Demonstration Installation Instructions, Source Code, and User Manual Assignments with detailed instructions and deadlines for each individual deliverable will be posted on Moodle. Deliverable deadlines are also indicated on the course schedule.

Project Expectations You should be aware that the primary purpose of this class is to teach you how to design software in a principled and systematic way. Therefore, each project must require a significant design effort. This is not a class that gives you practice on using the features of a database management system (DBMS); in other words, you should not expect to receive an A for a final software system that issues simple queries to get and store data in a database, and then displays the results on a webpage. You must design some computational element in your system. In order to produce a design and implementation that includes such computational elements, you should have prior knowledge of algorithms and data structures, and should know how to program in a high-level language like C++, Java, C#, or Ruby (or in the web design world, PHP, JSP, JavaScript, and AJAX). This course does not cover basic topics that you should already know as a computer science graduate student. It does not teach you a new language that you may need to implement your project; you should have developed the foundations for learning new a new language as an undergraduate student in computer science or related field. If you are not familiar with programming, data structures, and algorithms, then you should not take this course.