15-437/15-637 Fall 2012 Project Specification

Final Project Specification (due 31 October)

The goal of the specification is to clarify and precisely define the functionality of your Web application, as well as set goals or internal deadlines for your implementation of it. In the specification, you must include:

• A complete list of the actions that your site will support, with a brief description of each action. You should understand how you plan to implement each action, on which data it depends, and how complex/hard the action is to implement. (You don't need to include that latter information here, but it should guide your project planning.)
• A complete list of the views of your site, with complete mock-ups (preferably) or wire-frame drawings of each view. You should describe how each part of each view maps to each action.
• A complete description of the database layout your application will need. This can be just a list of the database tables and the columns in each table, with a description of any relationships that are non-obvious. Alternatively, you may provide code for all Java Beans that you intend to use persistently.
• A rough time-line for your implementation, including at least two checkpoint-dates (with specific goals for each date) that you can use to evaluate your progress. The first checkpoint date should be no later than 11 Nov, the second checkpoint date should be no later than 18 Nov, and your final implementation deadline should be no later than 27 Nov (the day before demos begin).

A typical specification is 4-6 pages of text plus whatever space you need to describe your views, but you should not use this length as a guideline. In the past, specifications have been as short as 4 pages (including a mock-up of the views) or as long as 30 pages! Your goal is to briefly, but completely describe your application, so that we (and you!) understand the full scope of the project you are about to implement.

Submitting your project specification

We will create a new SVN repository for your project soon for you and your project partner(s) to share; we will email you the address of this repository after we have created it.

Please submit your project specification by committing a .txt, .pdf, .ps, .html, .doc, or .docx file to the trunk/specification directory of your new SVN project repository.

Note that the late policy for this project specification is different than the late policy for the previous homeworks and project proposal. You may only use two late days for your project specification.

Last updated: Fri Nov 30 13:54:59 -0500 2012 [validate xhtml]