People
The term "stakeholder" is the software engineers' term for the people involved in a project. Simply put, a stakeholder is anyone who has some interest, large or small, in a software product.
There are a number of stakeholder categories for the scheduler project. At this early stage of the project, the stakeholders of note are the following:
- department schedulers
- student developers
- campus-level scheduling staff
In late Spring 2011, a mailing was sent to department schedulers across campus. The mailing briefly explained the objectives of the scheduler project, and inquired about interest in project participation. Of the approximately 70 recipients of the mailing, nearly half responded with an interest in participating in the initial requirements gathering phase. A follow-on message has been sent in the week before classes begin, to confirm continued interest in project participation. Those still interested will be contacted during the first week of the quarter, to schedule an initial requirements interview.
The student developers of the scheduler project will be members of two separate computer science courses. One course is a junior-level introduction to software engineering, numbered CSC 308. The other course is the senior-level software engineering capstone, numbered CSC 402. All of the students in both classes will be working on the scheduling project. Details of project team organization are outlined below.
At the campus-level, the offices of Susan Olivas are aware of the project. However, her office is not directly involved in project development, and is not sponsoring the project officially. The software product we are producing is targeted for the faculty and staff who perform scheduling at the department level. The registrar's office will be kept actively informed of project developments, and we look forward to possible technical cooperation with the registrar as the project progresses. The details of any such cooperation have yet to be established.
Development Team Organization
Combining both CSC 308 and 402, there will be approximately fifty students participating in the project. The roughly thirty-five 308 students will be divided into five teams of approximately seven members per team. Each 308 team will work on the requirements for a particular group of department schedulers.
The details of the "particular grouping" will evolve as the the initial project requirements are gathered. It may be that requirements are grouped by departments in a particular college. Alternatively, requirements may be grouped by departments with similar styles of scheduling, but which are in different colleges. Again, these organizational details will become clear after initial requirement interviews have been conducted.
The job of the 402 students will be to coordinate with the 308 teams, and conduct many other project-related tasks. As the quarter progress, the 402 students will evaluate the work of the 308 students. The complete details of the requirements process are beyond the scope of this introduction. The key work of the 402 students can be summarized as follows:
- determine which work of the 308 students "makes the cut", in that it is worthy of becoming part of the official project release
- refine and add to the 308 work as necessary, including reworking entirely if necessary
- lead the develop of an operational product prototype, that can be used to aid requirements gathering
- by the end of the quarter, coalesce the requirements of all stakeholders into a unified requirements document on which subsequent development will be based
Communication Among Stakeholders
There will be three primary forms of communication among project stakeholders:
- in-person meetings
- electronic mail
- the project website and wiki