There are two operational settings for the Grader Tool: (1) use by Cal Poly CSC instructors to maintain and organize student grades; (2) use by instructor's TA to input grades; (3) use by Cal Poly students to understand their own grades

The Grader Tool is intended to be used by instructors in the Cal Poly CSC department. The tool interfaces with the Cal Poly Student Information Services [SIS] computer in order to fetch and post information. Information such as an enrolled student's Cal Poly ID and grades are transferred between the tool and SIS. As such, the main operational setting in which it must be installed is the instructor's local machine, due to Cal Poly's strict non-disclosure agreement.

There are four physical settings for the Grader Tool: (1) the instructor's client computers, personal or department, in which student information are stored; (2) student's computer, personal or department, to fetch URLs linking to the Grader Tool's 'Student View' output; (3) the department server in which the instructors posts grades and students fetch them; (4) the SIS that syncs the instructor's client computer with data of the SIS. The Grader Tool can also finalize grades by transfering them to the SIS at the end of the quarter.

As noted in the preceding section on system personnel, there is a single primary customer for the Grader 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 Grader Tool requirements.

For use as a pedagogical example, the Grader 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 Grader Tool, are mainstream software engineering. Other instructors may therefore find the Grader Tool and its development artifacts useful as course examples.