C05—CISC474, Spring 2007
Design your own web app
(technology TBA)

For this assignment, you design a web app completely. This is an assignment for the entreprenurial type that has a "big idea"—one that might be too big for him/her to implement completely during this course.

The emphasis in this assignment is really on three aspects of development:

1. design of the user experience: development of the stories, the interactions with the user, and prototypes
2. a staging plan so that the development, testing and rollout can proceed in stages
   • for example, features foo, bar and fum are in stage one
   • in stage two, you add feature fiddle and dee-dee
   • and in stage three, you finally add the ability for fum and bar to be combined into phap.
3. the actual implementation of the smallest useful subset (i.e. your stage one)

If you are interest in pursuing this assignment, you should be in touch with the instructor early and often during office hours. The grading will be very individualized—you and the instructor will negotiate specific deliverables, with point values and due dates. However, you should have a fairly complete proposal for how and when you will complete all three aspects listed above (design of user experience, staging plan, implementation of stage one)

Your deliverables should be organized in the same manner as that described for assigments C02 and C03, as appropriate to the technology chosen for the implementation.

Grading

Grading will be based on whether the final product is usable and useful—not on "how hard you worked on it". So, it is important to be modest in what you propose. A very simple, modest application that is useful, written skillfully, and works well will earn more points that a flashy ambitious one that falls on its face. Go for functionality, not flash—but don't negect usability.

Also, see the grading criteria under C02 and C03—the ones appropriate to your chosen technology will be used as well.

Suggestions

Choosing good "phases", each of which is independently useful, is very important. So is doing unit testing, and disciplined version control—be sure to get something simple working first and check it in to the repository before moving on to something more complex, and don't check in broken code!