Next Steps

I have emailed my tutor today to alert him to this blog and to check that I am on target so far. I am not going to expect an instant response since I gather the tutors are as busy as us at this stage. Having described the project in the questions yesterday the next series of questions are supposed to help me scope the project. I don't feel ready to answer these fully yet.

1. What am I going to design and deliver as an end-product? At present this seems to mimic the last question in the previous section. I guess a fuller answer would be an attempt to fully capture the clients requirements, a design of how those requirements will be implemented, and a prototype system for the clients evaluation.
2. How am I going to identify the (basic) requirements? I am hoping that my client is going to do the basic foot work here, by giving me a list of what they would like to see which we can use as a basis for discussion with me being able to say what is overly ambitious at this stage, suggest features they haven't considere. From there we can hammer out a reasonable modified list of requirements.
3. How will I implement it: Through iteration? Incrementation? Both of these? Or some other strategy? I need to look again at the project life cycles document to choose the best or mix of best strategies. I know that a straight forward waterfall method will be of no use since the clients requirements and expectations are likely to change as they are refined.
4. How will I evaluate it? I think here that my clients response will have a major impact on my evaluation, are they happy with the end product? has it turned out as they expected? At the same time am I happy with the end product? Were there any major obstacles that I did not expect? Did the tasks match the measure of difficulty that I expected them to?

What do I need to do now?

• Compare and evaluate the life cycle models that have been presented to me in light of my chosen project.
• Elicit a basic list of requirements from my client as a starting point. I will be meeting with my contact Saturday evening and will be able to spend a deal of time chewing over requirements. At my next meeting I will have written up a list of what we have come up with so far and see if they have thought of anything to add.
• I also need to identify the major and minor sub tasks for the project.
• I also need to consider the resources that I need access to, these will include the language I intend to use and why, making sure that I have regular access to my clients representive as often as possible. At present this is arranged for each Saturday evening and so shouldn't present a problem (however people do get ill or change jobs!).
• Practical activity I need to source some relevent academic articles, so I need to start thinking about what areas I need to research. I will have begun to elicit requirements, I will also start on modelling the problem possibly in UML.

At present this is as far as I can go.