BUS
590B
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Description
of the Project
This project will provide a mechanism for applying the concepts learned
throughout the semester. Each group will select a significant (and somewhat
innovative) electronic commerce system to conceptualize for a simulated
business. The project will include the following phases:
· Conceptualize what your electronic commerce application can and can
not do. It is very important that you do more than just move an existing
process online. Instead, you need to think creatively about how the processes
can be structured to take maximum advantage of the networking capabilities
of the Internet.
· Analysis of the application. What are the functional requirements? Performance requirements?
· Determine
the network and software architecture necessary to support the application.
· Use
of middleware, security technologies, concurrency, etc.
·
Investigate vendors supplying tools, technologies, software development
services or system integration, etc. that will make it most cost effective
and lowest risk to develop this application.
The overall
grade awarded for the project will be a function of three things:
1) Milestones
2) Peer evaluations
3) Presentation
The milestone
breakdown will be as follows:
Milestone 1 - 0%
Milestone 2 - 30%
Milestone 3 - 20%
Milestone 4 - 15%
Milestone 5 - 35%
Milestone deadlines will be met by the group members emailing me their
URL when the milestone is complete. The entire group should be cc-ed on
this email.
Milestone
1 (due Sept. 20 by 6pm)
Create a web site for the group. The index page should contain the following:
Abstract of project idea (description of company and application)
·Group members
·Links to member e-mail addresses
·Links to project milestones
Select an
application your group would like to conceptualize for a company. Each
project group needs to select a different application. Therefore, your
idea must meet approval. On your group web site, write up the following
information (probably will be about 2-3 pages) for milestone one:
· Description of the application and what is unique about it.
· What is the scope of the application? Who will be served and what will
this application help them to accomplish?
· What general application capabilities ought to be applicable to the
application (social, information management, business, etc. -- be specific)?
· What innovative new capabilities can you include that are not available
in similar applications?
· How will this application benefit because it is web-based and available
online?
· Include a date stamp that indicates when it was last updated. You need
to include this just in case you make updates to the project definition
and scope later in the semester. It is acceptable to add modifications
later, but they will need to be documented as modifications with the modification
date included.
Milestone
2 (due Oct 13 by 3pm)
Milestones 2 and 3 will be the analysis of the application. Milestone
2 will deal with the functional requirements of the application. This
part of the analysis should include enough detail for the stakeholders
to examine and evaluate your plan and provide feedback. In real-world
situations, you would probably interview/survey people who would use the
application. In this case, try talking to people who resemble potential
users of the system. Your functional analysis will include:
· Goals - Describe the general goals of your application. What
is the application context and what do you plan to do for this context?
This will be an expansion and refinement of your first milestone.
· Impact - If these functional requirements are met, what impact
will your application make on the intended users? You need to convince
potential users that this application will be valuable to them. How will
these requirements relate to user productivity? How will these requirements
affect the cost and quality of the application? What are all the detailed
functions that your application performs? How will it impact the organization
- or other organizations?
· Scenarios - Provide usage scenarios. What steps will users following
in making use of your application. Give as many scenarios as necessary
to capture all the distinct capabilities of your application.
The grading
criteria for milestone 2:
15% Thorough discussion of Goals
30% Thorough discussion of Impacts
25% Thorough discussion of Scenarios
15% Originality of procedures and style of presentation
15% Innovativeness (ensure you are not simply automating an existing process)
Milestone 3 (due Oct 25 by 6pm)
Milestone 3 continues the analysis, but goes a step further and focuses
on performance issues. How can you provide your users with maximum value
without budgeting more than necessary? In other words, what are the minimum
performance and scalability requirements. To determine this, you will
need to analyze the following:
· Performance objectives - What functions of your application are
immediate? Deferred? What quantitative objectives are required? What performance
attributes are less critical? Justify your conclusions? For example, if
your web application has a pricing generator that produces appropriate
prices for various customers, this part of the application is important
but might have a lower priority than the ordering tool of your application.
Similarly, each customer would need to logon to the system and be able
to retrieve the pricing reports within 15 to 20 seconds. If you have distributed
databases, the system might require some type of synchronization every
24 hours. When a new user registers on your system, will you activate
their password within 5 minutes or is there a reason it would need 24
hours?
· Scalability - What is the largest conceivable usage of your application,
assuming it is a successful application. Think of this in terms of the
number of users, number of transactions, or other parameters that might
be relevant. This analysis will provide guidance during the architectural
phase.
If you have established details for your project idea, you should be able
to respond to these with no problem. If you don't have the details yet,
this will help you to think through them.
Milestone
4 (due Nov 8 by 6pm)
Address the issue of software reuse and consider the following
issues:
· Do you think your application could be used by multiple organizations?
Enough to justify a company developing it as a software product? If so,
what types of configurability and flexibility would be required to meet
the differing needs of many customers?
· Approach the above issue at a smaller granularity. What small-grain
software components would be useful enough to assemble into your application
and would be of general enough interest across many applications that
it would make sense to start a company to develop them as a product?
· What large-grain available components like databases would be useful
to incorporate into your application?
· If you plan on using databases in your application, define what database
files would be needed. Define generally what information each of these
databases would manage. (It is not intended that you do a detailed database
schema and design here, just define what information is generally needed
in your application and how it should be partitioned among databases.)
· Consider the roles of HTML and XML in your application. Where can they
be effectively used?
· Discuss the advantages and disadvantages to various approaches of creating
your web-based application. Can any functions be addressed with a commercial
off-the-shelf package? Does it need to be through internal development?
Outsourced development? Should you use the services of an ASP?
Milestone
5 (due Nov 29 by 6pm)
Address some of the technology issues for your application. In particular:
· Propose
a host architecture (client-server, number of tiers, peer-to-peer, etc.)
and justify.
· Consider the security issues for your application. What security techniques
are necessary, and where and how would they be used in your application?
· Consider the applicability of transaction processing, MOM, DOM, and
mobile code to your application. Where and how could you use these middleware
capabilities to benefit the application?
· Considering scalability needs, how would you partition your application
across hosts, and why? How would you expect that partitioning to change
to meet future scalability needs?
· What points of congestion would you expect to develop? How would you
mitigate them? In all this you are not trying to come up with hard performance
numbers, but rather addressing these issues qualitatively and intituitively.
You might
want to try using diagrams instead of straight text. It might help get
your ideas across better. And remember this milestone is worth more than
the others.
Presentations
The presentations will begin on November 29 during the second half of
class. Groups 5, 6 and 8 will present their EC application on this day.
The remaining groups will present on December 6.
The presentations will provide the class an opportunity to learn from
what other groups have been working on. Presentations will account for
a small portion of the overall project grade. Each group should prepare
a 15 minute presentation. Some groups have lots of info on their group
web site and will be able to use the site as their visual. Other groups
might need to supplement with additional visuals.