1. Introduction

The Class Scheduler provides an electronic means to design complex class schedules for educational institutions, matching up instructors with course sections along with room assignments for every section. Instructors use the Class Scheduler as a central repository of course and time preferences used in the scheduling. Students can use the Class Scheduler to query the schedules for upcoming quarters and to report demands for upcoming and past courses. Administrative users can create new schedules or edit existing ones and also perform other various administrative functions.

1.1.  Problem Statement

The general problems to be solved by the Class Scheduler are the following:

While some of these problems have been solved by a number of commercially available products, they are for high schools and not universities. The Class Scheduler provides the functionally a university needs that existing tools do not provide.

1.2.  System Personnel

The personnel involved in the Class Scheduler project are divided into the following groups:

The end users are those who use the Class Scheduler as a finished product. These users are divided into three sub-categories. The users within the different sub-categories have different needs for the tool and use it in different ways. Administrators have full access to the system, make the schedule, and can make edits to it. Instructors have access to view the schedule and change the settings of their entry in the instructor database. Students also have read-only privileges of the schedule and can submit comments within the student database.

Domain experts are those who currently know the scheduling process and the details around it. Lou Hitchner and Gene Fisher are the domain experts for this project. The system analysis team is the group of 205 students working on the Scheduler. The managers are the 205 professor, Gene Fisher, and the group leader, April Pingley. The design and implementation team is the 206 group working on this project.

1.3. Operational Setting

The main operational setting for the Class Scheduler is normal use as a functioning software system.

Since the Class Scheduler is designed as general public domain software, there is no specific operational setting in which it is intended to be installed. The setting for which it is appropriately suited is the CSC department at Cal Poly University or at any college or university where a department must create a complex schedule of courses with instructors to teach them along with corresponding rooms assignments.

1.4. Impacts

The positive consequences of the comprehensive scheduling system (especially on the professor(s) whose responsibility it is to schedule classes by hand), are numerous:

The users most likely impacted negatively by the system are professors whose preferences are not considered as sympathetically as might be by a human scheduler. Also, the possibility of a system error or miscalculation could cause widespread confusion and the process of fixing the system's errors would be time-consuming and expensive. Similarly, any network-related problems could result in frustration by users trying to access the system.

It is not likely that data corruption would result in any serious loss of irreplaceable data, only the time required to import data into the system's database would be lost, and any time spend by the administrator changing settings or tweaking output.

1.5 Related Systems

Widely used commercial systems that provides functionality partially comparable to the Scheduler include

Both of these systems provide the same basic scheduling functionally needed at the high school level. Class Scheduler does provide tremendous improvement in a number of areas, when compared to these commercially available tools. These improvements are: The goals for the Class Scheduler in relation to public domain source code are not met by any of the above commercial systems.
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