Software Engineering with an Agile Development Framework/Iteration Three/Style guide

Case study Inventory Management

Group: Micheal Yee, Russell Craig, Che Campbell for Ace Suit Hire A strong corporate image was required for an inventory management system for a suit hire business. The software system was developed to manage and track Ace Suit Hire inventory.

Case study Northern Cemetery

Group: Christine Rout, Daniel Butel, Meikle Skelly This project aimed to provide a resource for a heritage tourism trust. The project was essentially a dynamic webpage for a cemetery but with several added complications, primary among these the 18,000 historical records to manage. The group made a static webpage quite quickly and extensively used several versions of this in communication with the client, from this the group developed the functional requirements. The client was happy and the group “just needed to make prototype robust”. They then proceeded to develop the prototype – making dynamic and adding “functions and polish”. After following this path for about six weeks, the group realised that were heading down a dead end. The approach to development was not working as the client was becoming distracted by details of the prototype (comments on font etc when they were trying to discuss functions), and a realisation that they had missed the logical design steps of task analysis, interactivity design etc. The group then stopped development of the prototype and then went through logical and physical design properly. Going back through these stages highlighted assumptions they had made with the prototype, they had assumed an encyclopaedia approach but a story approach focus was much better. The wireframe designs allowed focus on content. “ “Prototyping was undertaken…investigating possible layouts for pages such as the home page and the burial details of an individual. While these pages focused on layout, colours were just randomly chosen when the colour schemes that the client had expressed interest in could have been included instead… After meeting and having some heated discussion surrounding this issue, the group reached the conclusion that this method of prototyping was not going to work and that a more structured approach was needed”. ” The group realised early on that the system would be a dynamic webpage. Early in the project (while redoing the logical design) they developed a structure that provided a stable platform for development: a database with read/write/edit that generated webpages in the required language. In the third iteration the group developed style guides to determine the look of each page. From there it was a relatively simple implementation to combine the stable platform and the style guides to produce the finished product.