FALL 2000

Team Project Ideas

Major Metro Traffic Design

Your firm PDQSoft, Inc. has been asked by the municipal planning department of MonsterBurg to provide them with a long-term solution to the problem of traffic pattern management.

Nothing so frustrates their citizenry and the many thousands of visitors each year as the tie-ups in vehicular traffic on the streets and highways of MonsterBurg. Moreover, public safety is endangered when firetrucks, ambulances and police vehicles cannot reach people facing immediate danger.

The MonsterBurg planning department has decided that it needs a tool for regulating the traffic controls placed or to be placed at intersections and bottlenecks so as to maximize traffic flows fairly and to clear paths for emergency vehicles as needed. The problem is both one of live control and one of planning and design.

They first want a planning and design tool able to simulate traffic control system behavior when fed a variety of observed or imagined traffic patterns and problems.

You are to use your imagination in elaborating the requirements of this problem and features which the planning department might find useful. Feel free to add detail to the situation. Consult with anyone who you think might have good ideas. A surrogate client may be contacted via rogere@rpi.edu.

Rationale Management

You are a software team working for developer SoftSpace, Inc. This is a growing software developer which has decided that too often it loses track of the reasons for key decisions made during the design and development of systems for clients. It is highly embarrassing to be challenged for reasons why something works the way it does weeks after the decision has been made. It's not enough to claim, "Well, it seemed right at the time."

Just as compelling a concern is the need to build the positive results of a project into the firm's expertise by being able to make use of good reasoning in like circumstances in future projects.

During the formative stages of a project, dozens of employees and clients are engaged in requirements elicitation, concept generation and evaluation, feature selection, prototyping and design specification. During implementation, tricky problems arise for which numerous proposed ideas just won't work and then a really great idea does work. The rationale behind both positive and negative decisions is generally worth retaining.

A system for a disciplined and thorough management of design decisions is missing from the arsenal of SoftSpace development tools. A simple, flexible means of capturing the ideas considered, their evaluation (and just who was involved), and their use in reconsideration of the decisions of an on-going project and in work on analogous projects is wanted.

Rationale is the most important information in the development process. It is also the most complex information developers generate. Consult chapter 8 of the textbook by Bruegge & Dutoit and use your imagination in formulating requirements. A surrogate SoftSpace manager may be contacted via rogere@rpi.edu.

Online Community Builder
The new information economy depends on linkages among people and organizations with shared concerns or interests. Building virtual communities is seen as a key function of many new e-businesses. The traditional forms of community building use advertising, mailing lists and referrals. Your firm PeopleLink,LLC plans to use the data gathering power of web browsing to enhance community building.

A variety of web-based methods will be combined to build communities based on themes chosen by the users of the new PeopleLink software. These will include online versions of advertising, mailing lists, referrals and user responses to web sites and mailings. PeopleLinkšs system will be distinguished by additional methods, including applets which explore a browseršs cookie collection, bookmarks and recent page trail.

Home Automation

You have just joined CyberCore, LLC and the firm has just won a contract to develop a new digital product for giant Domestic Arts of America, Inc. Your team is to be the core of the effort.

DAA wants to move aggressively into the world of household automation for the slightly better off, techno-centric homeowning public. They are convinced that there is a huge market awaiting the right product and sales pitch, and are ready to cut CyberCore in on the business if you succeed.

The project has the code name Mr. Wright (a reference to architect Frank Lloyd Wright). Mr. Wright is to enable homeowners to program control of virtually every appliance and movable component of the house. Thus coffee makers, TV's, heating pads, lights, garage doors, alarms, windows, pumps, phones, etc. will all be subject to programming and local and remote software control.

Needless to say, DAA doesn't know how to accomplish all this. They are just visionaries, after all. In fact, they probably don't recognize that this is an open-ended business, with new home features and appliances being invented all the time. So you are first to research home automation, work with DAA to define and develop an exciting yet feasible product or product line.

Your focus should be on developing flexible and extensible home automation interfaces for homeowners, recognizing that they will want convenient controls and will need to modify the number and types of devices involved from time to time. You should study the large range of HA hardware available (a web search will reveal a staggering amount of information). Then either select a class of hardware with which your software will function or formulate requirements for such devices (for others to design and build).

There is great opportunity for you to use your imagination in formulating requirements. Consult with anyone who you think might have good ideas. A surrogate DAA client and CyberCore manager may be contacted via rogere@rpi.edu.

Edwin H. Rogers (rogere@rpi.edu) ================> BACK to D&D Home