Keeping Track of Your Geocaching Outings When Wayne Johansen turned 16, his dad bought him a new Garmin handheld GPS system. His family had always enjoyed camping and hiking, and Wayne was usually the member of the family who monitored their hikes with his dads GPS system. He always liked to carry the GPS because he really enjoyed monitoring the routes, distances, and altitudes of their hikes. More recently, though, he had found a new hobby by using his GPS system: geocaching. Geocaching is akin to the treasure hunts that most of us did when we were kids. The difference is that geocaching is a high-tech version of a treasure hunt that uses GPS but also calls on ones basic treasurehunting skills. As Wayne became more involved with his hobby, he discovered that there are many different kinds of activities for geocaching enthusiasts. The simplest ones are those that involve caches that can be found by using GPS coordinates, although even some of these can be difficult if the caches are well hidden and well camouflaged. Some of the activities involve multipoint drops in which there is a set of clues at multiple locations that must be followed in order to arrive at the final cache point. Some activities involve puzzles that must be solved in order to determine the coordinates and location of the final cache. Before long, Wayne wanted to make his own caches and post them for people to find. He discovered that there were several Web sites, including individuals blogs, with geocaching information, caches, and memberships. He joined one of the geocaching Web sites and used it to log his finds. It was fun to log and publish his finds and to post the geocaches that he created. But he decided he would like his own little system for keeping track of all the information he wanted to maintain about his caches. Conveniently, Waynes older brother Nick, a college student majoring in information systems, was looking for a semester project for one of his programming classes. The two of them decided to work together and develop a system to help Wayne keep track of all his geocaching activities. In this end-of-chapter case, you will go through the various core processes of an SDLC and perform some of the activities of a development project. Of course, this is a very small project with very limited requirements. The project and various assignments are divided into days, as was our Tradeshow project. You have not learned all the skills required to effectively produce all the documents illustrated in the chapter. Hence, the daily assignments for this case should be considered as preliminary efforts and rough drafts. The objective of these assignments is simply to help you remember the overall approach to software development. Several assignments have been listed for each day to allow your instructor to select those that best meet the objectives of the course.

We often describe the activities on Day 2 and Day 3 with the word understanding. On Day 2, we want to get an overall view of what the system needs to do for Wayne. As you learned in this chapter, there are two primary areas we focus on to obtain this high-level understanding of the system: a list of use cases and a list of object classes. We could document this information in lists, but diagrams provide a visual representation that is often easier to remember and understand. These activities support Core Process 3: Discover and understand the details of the problem or the need.

: Identify a few use cases that apply to one subsystem. [Hint: Think of what Wayne plans to do with the system. He will use the system to do what?]