1.4. Impacts

The positive impacts of the Scheduling Tool as a functioning system are increased convenience and efficiency in managing teachers and course schedules.  The positive impacts of the Scheduling Tool as a course example are

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

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

 

Potential negative impacts include those common to any user-oriented software system.  If the system is poorly designed and implemented, it can be inconvenient to use and decrease rather than increase user productivity.  More negative impacts relate to issues of privacy, reliability, and data integrity.  If the system implementation is flawed, it may reveal private information such as teacher ids or preferred courses settings that teachers do not wish to be revealed.  If a school relies on a flawed implementation of the system to organize and create a fluid schedule for its teachers, and such events are improperly or incomplete scheduling, the school may suffer significant disruption of its operations.  One possible negative impact is a slow implementation of this tool will takes too long to generate or modify a schedule.  Not being careful about the implementation will lead to unfair teacher scheduling in terms of teachers preferences.  Another example of a flawed implementation would be scheduling multiple classes in the same room at the same time.  This would be disastrous for the administrators, teachers and students alike.  Significant disruption may also occur if the system looses or corrupts important scheduling data.  Lastly, any undetected subtle flaw in the implementation will be a major set back since these problems will not be discovered until the schedule is in use.  





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