[Expressions-development] Future Plans

[<an...@al...>]

Hello everyone,

It's been a long time without any activity at all, but hopefully  
things will start to progress slowly from now on.

What I think we should do is to:

1: Write a questionnaire to find out whether the initial concept  
using two clients talking to each other and providing a backlog of  
entries is a good idea or not and what we could learn from already  
existing blogging software. Andrea and I have started a list of  
questions we want in the questionnaire; Andrea, could you please send  
them to this list?

2: Use the results from the questionnaire together with persona  
descriptions (a persona is an imaginary user; Andrea and I have  
already described four personas -- see attached document) and the  
diagram to write user stories. A user story is a short story  
describing how a persona might use the software to perform one or a  
specific set of tasks. The goal is to find out how the workflow  
should be, or how it shouldn't be. It will also give us an  
opportunity to think a bit about the requirements (which data do we  
need where, which parts of the software have to communicate with each  
other).

3: Write use cases (that's basically a fancy word for "list of things  
you can do with the software") and requirement specifications based  
on the user stories. At the end of this step, we should have a  
prototype GUI which we can test with users. I will try to describe  
requirement specifications a bit more later in this email, for those  
of you who are unfamiliar with requirement specifications.

4:  In this step we finalize the GUI, and come up with the  
architecture of the system (for example, which components does the  
software have, and how are they connected to each other). We also  
decide on how to store data, and the communication protocol between  
the mobile client and the desktop client, and how both of them talk  
to the blog.

5: Make a class diagram.

6: Implement.

This might seem like a lot of paperwork, but it will provide contents  
for those of us who want to publish papers, while also making sure  
that everyone involved has a clear view of what is going on. Since we  
are all spread out a bit, and collaborating over the Internet, it  
will make cooperation much easier if we all know who's doing what,  
and how it is being done ;)

In our requirement specification the most important things we want to  
have are prioritizing features and the hardware requirements (do we  
only supporting blue phones with the latest version of java, or do we  
try to be a bit more generic, and if so, what does the different  
platforms have to have?) . However, we also want some more  
descriptions of the project in order to make the requirement  
specification easier to read by not referring to emails or other  
documents. It is also very probable that we will have to update this  
document a few times until we are actually implementing the software.
If you want to know more, look at http://www.techwr-l.com/techwhirl/ 
magazine/writing/softwarerequirementspecs.html,  or this template at  
http://www2.ics.hawaii.edu/~johnson/413/lectures/5.2.html (ignore  
section 8, 10, 11).


If you have any questions, or if anything feel confusing, please bug  
me ;)

Cheers,

Andreas