The First Wave of Documents

Team. Here are the documents which we promised for this Monday, 02.02.2015. They are available on Google Drive via shareable hyperlinks. If a link is not click-able, paste in your browser's address bar.

Executive Summary

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B101EUHMgepNcUVFX0t4YXpfb2M/view?usp=sharing

Feature Specification

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B101EUHMgepNLXpaelRxUjRSb0k/view?usp=sharing

Requirements Analysis Document

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B101EUHMgepNLUx4aUgwaHNDQkk/view?usp=sharing

Each document is less than four type-written pages not including the coversheet and table of contents. The first version of the CABOOSE system has only five features. The first three of these features represent the system's core offerings. Seeing that the final prototype was not more than five hundred lines of code, this is reasonable. One also will see that the concern space contains seven high-level requirements. The first feature produced three of these. The remaining features each only produced one. For those of you familiar with the numerous sections and subsections of formal life-cycle documents, you might consider these documents somewhat lean in their content. Yet, we hope that each document which we produce is less than thirty minutes worth of reading. This goal of combined succinctness and simplicity means that we must type less and deliver an equivalent message.

Unfortunately for the students of some of our former academic mentors who read this weblog, you cannot simply copy the documents and use them as a complete template for your semester projects.  But, they can be a starting point for the organization of the more detailed documents required for supporting the Rational Unified Process of other formal process that you might be using. These simple documents are better suited for a Personal Software Process (PSP) and work well with the simple evolutionary model that we are using.

With the blessing of our former mentors, we will place templates for the documents supporting a semester software engineering project online in a few weeks. These were created circa 1999 - 2004. Be advised that document formats and best practices might have changed some.

Being completely "ad-hoc" when building small projects is tempting, but some level of formality and organization will help support the longevity of the project. Hence, we have created these documents. Obviously, one can produce a five hundred line program in a day. But, it is the insights which one has along the way when working slowly that are often epiphanies for projects which one creates in a day or weekend.

More, documents for CABOOSE will be coming soon. We will have a brief discussion about building and fixing in the morning. Enjoy this day of work,  study , and rest. La-La.