CSSE 371  --  Software Requirements and Specification  --  Fall 2004

Homework 9

Due Thursday, October 21, 2004

Purpose: Practice specifying nonfunctional requirements.

Note:  This is an individual assignment, but it uses artifacts your team is working on for the class project.  You will need access to those artifacts, and you will need to coordinate what you do on this assignment with the rest of your team (see item 3, below).

What to do:

1.      Keep track of the amount of time you spend on this assignment.

2.      From the actual project you are working on as a team, gather the following:

a.       The Supplementary Specification (in whatever its current condition is), and

b.      The Use Cases (however many of those you have, in whatever condition they are in).

3.      Pick one quality attribute (nonfunctional requirement area) for your project, from among the official list of six in the Template[1].  Discuss how you will do this as a team.  Each team member should select a different quality attribute!

4.      Without looking at what your team’s Supplementary Specification says about this quality attribute (yikes!), do the following :

5.      Comb through the use cases, looking for places where this quality attribute would be involved.  Write at least 3 scenarios (using the Template’s examples and suggestions as a model) for this quality attribute.  These you will turn in for this HW 9.

6.       Now you can look – Compare these 3 scenarios to what you already have in your Supplementary Specification for this quality attribute.  As a part of HW 9, describe how the new ones you just wrote compare and contrast to what’s already there (if anything).

7.      Recommend to your team the enhancements / changes to the scenarios for this quality attribute which you have just discovered!

8.      It’s very likely that, when you were combing over the use cases, you discovered things that should be changed there, too.  Recommend these changes to your team, as well. 

à Don’t just hack the changes to your team’s use cases as you go.  You want your teammates to see and approve what you want to change.  Also, you want to avoid multiple team members’ making different changes all at once!  (If your team hasn’t figured out a system for doing this effectively yet, that might be worth some discussion at your next team meeting.)

9.      Turn in what you did for items (5) and (6), above, in the drop box for this HW 9 assignment.  Don’t forget to note how long it took!

 



[1] The template for Supplementary Specs, out under Handouts, that is.