Project Introduction/Requirements - Blog 01

This week we were introduced to the project that 11 classmates and I will be working on together throughout this semester in this Software Engineering course. Professor Krawitz will be playing the role as the client for this project, so it is our job as the software engineers to implement a solution his problem.

At the end of the semester, Boston Code Camp (BCC) hosts multiple speakers who give talks about various topics relating to computers and programming. BCC works thanks to its sponsors, who put the money towards the expenses that go into affording these speakers to come, and to pay for the event in general. The goal for the sponsors is to put the money in certain expenses in the hopes of making profit from them. In order to ensure that the event stays profitable, the sponsors want to know how well the speakers are building and holding the audience in the room. If a speaker is not that well known, perhaps not many people will show up. If a speaker is boring, people will leave part way through the presentation, whereas captivating speakers will hold the majority of the audience for the duration of the presentation. The sponsors are interested in this data of how many people show, leave, and stay for these presentations. Historically, volunteers (often from Wentworth), would count the number of people in the room at the beginning middle and end of each talk, write these numbers down, and deliver them by hand to those keeping record of this data. Our client wants an easier, more efficient, software solution to expedite the delivery of this data from the counter to the sponsors.

To do this, we will need to use what we've learned so far at Wentworth along with the knowledge that will be obtained throughout the semester via video lectures. This week we learned that the first stage of a implementing a software solution is to gather the requirements of the project. Before we begin coding or even think about any part of design or implementation that will go into solving the problem, we first need to know what it is that we actually need to do. We spent a small portion of class this week brainstorming what some of the requirements are going to be for this project. The biggest point made about thinking of requirements for a project is that we need to be answering the question of "what" needs to be done, not "how" it will be done. Next week we will work as a team to accumulate a final list of these requirements and discuss them with the client to ensure we are on the same page as "what" needs to be done here. Updates on this will come in next weeks blog so stay tuned!