Memorandum

From:	Project Manager, Director
To:	New Employees
Subject:	Welcome to the team

Welcome to EdSoft’s next great product development team. 

As you’ve heard, the CEO has decided that EdSoft's next software product will be a suite of tools for teachers to automate student tracking and paperwork.   The marketing department found no product currently on the market to help teachers manage a spectrum of inter-related responsibilities, which of course includes tracking and as a software engineer, we want you to spend the next month performing the first phase of development for the grade book piece, a module which will allow the teacher to keep track of just one student's grades for a whole term. The next phase (to be implemented by the lead software engineer), will incorporate your code into a program that keeps track of a whole list of students' grades.

The limitations of this first version of the new software are:

• it will not save the grades to disk

• it will not check user input for errors

• it will not have a graphical user interface

• in order to change the metadata (e.g. the weight that the teacher gives to the midterm grade, or the total points possible for a homework assignment), the named constants in the source code must be modified, and the source code must be recompiled.

Many of these limitations will be overcome in version 2.

As the project manager, I have divided this project up into four tasks. For each task, you will deliver either a document or code to me through our Etudes NG website. In Etudes NG, click on the "Assignments" tool at the left.

At one point during this project you will make an oral presentation of your solution to the team and at least once you will critique another developer's work. Your deliverables will be reviewed by myself, the marketing department, the lead software architect, and a representative user to be sure that what you implement will be usable.

Your four tasks will include:

1 - User Requirements

2 - System Requirements

3 - Class Design

4 - Implementation

Important Notes:

Each week, two junior engineers will orally present the solution to the task due.

Each presenter will be critiqued by two others on the team.

Tasks must be completed in order; i.e. you cannot proceed to the next task until the previous one is complete, and you have received feedback from your project manager.

Thanks,

Director

 

“There are two times in a man’s life when he should not speculate: when he can’t afford it and when he can.” (Mark Twain, Following the Equator, 1897)