403 Project Description (Autumn 1999)

CSE Home

About Us

Search

Contact Info

Overview

Your team has been given the 10-week assignment of designing, building, testing, and deploying a new product called Team Assignment Grouping 2000 (TAG 2000). This product will be used to divide future classes into appropriate development teams.

Problem statement

The current method of dividing a class into teams is inadequate and haphazard at best. Instructors might ask a few questions and assign groups or just leave it up to the students to coagulate into their own groups. None of this takes into accurate account the talents and schedules of each team member. We envision a new product where the students supply pertinent information and TAG 2000 then gives them their appropriate group assignments. These assignments will be done to produce the most equitable and compatible groups.

Goals of the project

At the start of each new quarter the instructor supplies TAG 2000 with a set of criteria and weighting for forming each group. This includes individual schedules, special skills, team size, and academic year, etc. The instructor also provides the class list. Each student then (via a web page) is able to add data about themselves which TAG 2000 uses to divide the class into appropriate groups. At any time, both the instructor and the students should be able to see their group assignments.

• TAG 2000 needs to use all the information supplied by the instructor and students to produce the most equitable set of development groups. The instructor supplies the criteria used to define equitable, but TAG 2000 can limit the choices available to choose from.
  
• Instructors must be able to override certain group assignments and as necessary change the criteria. This is needed to handle compatibility cases not anticipated by TAG 2000. There then needs to be a feedback loop to add new criteria into TAG 2000.
  
• TAG 2000 must also supply the instructor feedback as to how well the program has been able to satisfy the group assignment criteria. This allows the instructor to then weaken or strengthen the criteria as necessary.
  
• Students must also not be able to alter or view all the data for other students. This would help ensure that unscrupulous individuals cannot build bias groups.
  
• TAG 2000 must supply immediate group assignment feedback. In this day and age a GUI interface is a must. Each user can then dynamically see how their groups are forming. Note that this program must also allow multiple users simultaneous access. Future versions will need to hide certain group information until everyone agrees to the group assignment.
  
• TAG 2000 must assign all the students into a group. A future version of the program will need to handle inequitable group assignment criteria.

These are fairly modest and attainable goals for TAG 2000. But note that with a little tweaking TAG 2000 can be used as a dating service, for dorm room assignments, etc. This fact has not been overlooked by the company’s sales force who has been chomping at the bit to sell TAG 2000. They’ve already promised more than one customer that it will be delivered on time and will solve all their manpower assignment problems. Please note that time to market is critical and any slippage could result in product requirements changing.

Milestones

The development manager is a finicky sort that likes to see regular progress reports. Your group must therefore present oral progress reports as the project progresses. The first report is due two weeks into the project. It should include a more formal statement of the TAG 2000 requirements, a functional description of TAG 2000, and your development plan for TAG 2000. The development plan must include individual responsibilities, a list of milestones, and a testing plan. Subsequent progress reports will then be for updating the milestones and tracking overall progress.

The development manager is not picky about the actual programming language used to implement TAG 2000. C/C++ or Java is acceptable. Also the choice of machines, Unix or Windows, is left to the team’s discretion. The only requirement in these areas is that there be consistency throughout the team. Consistency and simplicity is the key to a successful TAG 2000 release.

	Department of Computer Science & Engineering University of Washington Box 352350 Seattle, WA  98195-2350 (206) 543-1695 voice, (206) 543-2969 FAX [comments to garyki@cs.washington.edu]