1.1. Problem Statement

The general problems to be addressed by the Grader Tool project are the following:

  1. To provide a reliable and easy to use software tool for teachers and students to keep track of grades

  2. To provide a secure environment that does not expose empl ID’s or other students’ names
While these problems have been solved by a number of commercially available and public domain products, the Grader Tool provides a solution with certain functional improvements over existing tools. Specific problem areas are the following:

  1. Allowing the teacher to easily adjust grades using a histogram or pie chart

  2. Hierarchical categories

  3. Support for extra credit

  4. Support for late penalties

  5. Grade Estimation/Prediction

  6. Student View

  7. Student View

  8. Cost (Most dedicated grading programs are not free)

The Grader Tool project addresses the requirements of a particular customer. This customer needs a tool with a collection of features not available in any single existing tool. This aspect of the problem is one of combining a set of existing features in a way that the features have yet to be combined in another product.

In addition, the development of functioning software, the Grader Tool project focuses on two additional problems not addressed in commercial tools:

  1. To provide a pedagogical example for use in the instruction of software engineering, including an example of the practical application of formal methods

  2. To provide fully documented, public domain source code for use by others




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