There are two operational settings for the Calendar Tool: (1) normal use as a functioning software system; (2) use as an example in software engineering courses.

The Calendar Tool is intended to be general public domain software. As such, there is no specific operational setting in which it must be installed. The setting for which it is appropriately suited is an office or organizational environment of some form, where users maintain their own calendars and need to schedule meetings with other users on a regular basis.

As noted in the preceding section on system personnel, there is a single primary customer for the Calendar Tool, and he is representative of customers in a particular university department. As such, the tool's requirements reflect the point of view of the customer base, including their work setting. Given the intent to develop a general-purpose product, the customer has made a conscience effort to exclude setting-specific features from the Calendar Tool requirements.

For use as a pedagogical example, the Calendar Tool has been designed to fit the curriculum used by Gene Fisher in undergraduate and graduate software engineering courses at Cal Poly University. These courses are two-quarter sequences that cover standard aspects of software engineering, with emphasis on the practical application of formal methods. For the most part, the concepts covered in these courses, and hence the concepts embodied in the Calendar Tool, are mainstream software engineering. Other instructors may therefore find the Calendar Tool and its development artifacts useful as course examples.