1.4. Impacts

The positive potential impacts of the Calendar Tool as a functioning system are increased convenience and efficiency in managing individual and group calendars. The positive impacts of the Calendar Tool as a course example are

  1. the presentation of a non-trivial software system that students can use as a guide for their own software development work;

  2. an illustration of how formal methods of can be put to practical use.

Potential negative impacts include those common to any user-oriented software system. Viz., if the system is poorly designed and implemented, it can be inconvenient to use and decrease rather than increase user productivity. More specific negative impacts relate to issues of privacy, reliability, and data integrity. If the system implementation is flawed, it may reveal private information that users do not wish to be revealed. If an organization of users relies on a flawed implementation of the system to schedule critical events, and such events are improperly or incompletely scheduled, the organization may suffer significant disruption of its operations. Significant disruption may also occur if the system looses or corrupts important calendar data.

As a course example, the use of the Calendar Tool has no significant negative impacts, unless its development methodology is considered weak or unrelated to the concepts being taught in a particular course. Such negative impacts can be easily avoided if instructors carefully examine the example before using it in a particular software engineering curriculum.




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