Project 2.1: Preliminary Brainstorming for Your Web Application

For Project 2, you and your team will develop a database-backed web application. There are eight phases spread over five weeks. The following is a loose schedule of these phases:

• Week 3 (Mon 4/13 – Sun 4/19)
  • Phase 1: Pick partners, pick data sources, pick an audience, brainstorm use cases and features.
  • Phase 2: Decide on features and create user interaction storyboards.
• Week 4 (Mon 4/20 – Sun 4/26)
  • Phase 3: Design a development plan, including testing for all components, and simultaneous development of front-end and back-end components.
  • Phase 4: Create a “Hello, World” webapp that covers the full data path: client → server → database → server → client.
• Week 5 (Mon 4/27 – Sun 5/3)
  • Phase 5: Design the software architecture.
• Week 6 (Mon 5/4 – Sun 5/10)
  • Phase 6: Design the database structure; create and populate the database.
  • Phase 7: Build version 1 of the web application: minimal core features of the front end and back end.
• Week 7 (Mon 5/11 – Sun 5/17)
  • Phase 8: Implement and test one feature at a time, to build toward the complete and refined final version of your web application. (This process, doing one little testable bite at a time, is a form of iterative development.)

Throughout the project, you will get practice with user-centered design, test-driven development, modular software architecture design, client/server interface design, and documentation. True UCD requires user testing throughout the development of your application, which is beyond our scope in this class, unfortunately.

However, in this phase the goal is to identify a user base, come up with a compelling tool for them, and engage in a design process that is focused on the user's experience.

A secondary goal is to let me know who's going to be working together.

Please pick a team of two people and enter your names in the Project 2 partner spreadsheet. To enter your team, list both team member's usernames in the first two columns of the next open line. Follow the examples already shown. The column of greyed-out names to the right is just for me to see who's been added correctly to a team so far; it has nothing to do with what row you should enter your usernames on.

If you'd like to work in a trio, that's probably okay too, but please email me to check.

Team choices are due Wednesday morning, 2/15, at 10:45am. Anyone not signed up for a team at that time will be randomly assigned one by me.

Your submission for this phase of the project will be a single PDF document called web_app_conception.pdf. Only PDFs will be accepted. Your PDF should contain the following things:

• The names of all team members, the title of your project, and the URL for your team's repository.

  The name of this repository should be cs257_webapp, so its URL should be https://bitbucket.org/<username>/cs257_webapp. You'll need to set up this repository, give all group members write access to it, and share it (read-only) with me and the graders.

• A description of the user population that you'd like to serve.
• A short paragraph describing what your group intends to build. (A bit of advice: it's much better, in a time-limited project like this, to aim for a small thing and achieve it than to aim big and fall short. This will be a richer experience for you if you limit your scope.)

• A brief description of the dataset your application will use.

  This description should include link(s) to where the data comes from, licensing information that makes it clear you're allowed to use the data for academic purposes, and information about how you will actually get your hands on the data (maybe there's a simple download of a csv/xls/txt file, but maybe there's not...).

  You may find it useful to peruse my page of public data resources. It just barely scratches the surface of the data you could potentially use, but it might help spark your imagination. If you're interested, Carleton also has data related to sustainability and energy use and weather.

• A list of features you want your web application to include, ordered from most important to least important.

  Design your list so that I could split it in half at almost any point, and your project would still be an interesting and complete application if you only implemented the first half.

Push your PDF (and the source document for it, particularly if you write it using LaTeX) to the repository that you created above. Tag your commit with phase_2_1, and make sure that the graders and I will be able to see it!