1.4. Impacts

The positive potential impacts of the Scheduler Tool are increased convenience and efficiency in managing teachers, classes, and classrooms, and in creating schedules for a department of a university.  Most specifically this tool should save significant amounts of time in creating a schedule by using the automatic schedule generator, and in transitioning information about courses, instructors, and classrooms from quarter to quarter.  This tool should also create a higher degree of fairness in scheduling to teacher preferences since teacher’s will be allowed to give a more detailed description of when, and what they would to teach, and because the application will create the schedule, thus reducing human influence.  This application should also be capable of creating a schedule which is better adapted to room preferences than the current methods of scheduling in the Computer Science department since it will take room availability into consideration while generating the schedule, not afterward.

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 or slow, and decrease rather than increase user productivity
• If security flaws are present in the implementation it could provide a malicious user to edit or delete a schedule when they should not normally have such access.
• If an organization of users relies on a flawed implementation of the system to create a valid schedule, and in return are given a poor schedule marked as an effective one, problems such as instructors being scheduled in two places at once, or a room scheduled for two courses could arise.
• If the system becomes corrupted and stored data is lost, the organization may suffer significant disruption of its operations.  As this type of system would commonly be used as the primary storage location of faculty and course data, data loss could prevent a significant detriment to operations.

The positive impacts of the Scheduler Tool as a course example are

• the presentation of a non-trivial software system that students can use as a guide for their own software development work
• An illustration of how formal methods of development can be put to practical use.

As a course example, the use of the Scheduler Tool has no significant negative impacts, unless its development methodology is considered weak or unrelated to the concepts being taught in a particular course. Such negative impacts can be easily avoided if instructors carefully examine the example before using it in a particular software engineering curriculum.