1.4. Impacts

          The class scheduler tool has some positive impacts including increased efficiency and ease of conflict resolution.

            The positive impacts of this program are:

                        - Increased efficiency in the creation of the class schedule

                        - Fairly schedule all the classes so that no teacher has a harder or more unfair load than any other

                        - Easier transitions between each quarter because of loading information from the previous quarter.

Some of the negative impacts that are inherent in a piece of software are if the program is poorly designed the user may have trouble finding something that he’s looking for and become frustrated in his inability to figure out how to complete the task he is working on. Some other problems may arise in the aspects of privacy and security. The class/time preferences may be private for certain professors and external viewing of those preferences should not be allowed.

            Some of the negative side effects could be:

-          Complex algorithms may be difficult to change if other problems arise later

-          Poor implementation could lead to an extremely slow schedule generator

-          Unfair schedules generated by poor teacher preferences algorithms

-          Subtle implementation problems could lead to bigger problems (ex. Double booking)

-          Some teachers may not remember to update their preferences and receive an unfair or difficult schedule



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