An Interactive Multimedia Software House Simulation for Postgraduate Software Engineers. An Interactive Multimedia Software House Simulation. Postgraduate Software Engineers. I've tried using the Select Yourdon Case tool for the predesign work on a project and it is reasonably consistant with LabVIEW. Used the Select Yourdon CASE tool for a top-down structured requirements analysis resulting in a formally reviewed and accepted set of software documentation. What is a data flow diagram (DFD)? A picture is worth a thousand words. A Data Flow Diagram (DFD) is traditional visual representation of the information flows within.
Helen Sharp and Pat Hall. Computing Department, The Open University, Walton. Hall, Milton Keynes MK7 6. AA, UK,+4. 4 1. 90. Abstract: The Open University's M8. Software. Engineering is a postgraduate distance education course aimed. About half of the course is taken up. The case study. element of the course (approximately 8. Open Software Solutions (OSS). The student `joins' OSS as an. In this paper, we present the background to the. Keywords: Educational multimedia, distance education. Introduction. The Open University educates mature part- time students at a. Courses are delivered through a mixture of media such as. Internet. Software engineering courses at university are concerned with. Contact with real software. Up to 1. 99. 7 our M8. Software. Engineering course included a video of a software development. We began planning. M8. 80, in 1. 99. Why multimedia? Ideally we would like our students to all work in identical. This is situated (Mc. Lellan, 1. 99. 5) or anchored. Bransford et al, 1. Case studies described in text or on video can be. Multimedia. held out the prospect of doing this. In addition, our students have. Educational multimedia products vary considerably in the. Boyle, 1. 99. 7. Ed- Media, 1. At its simplest, interaction takes. Page turning may be slightly. Animations may permit the. Encarta 9. 7 Deluxe. We were looking for more sophisticated interaction styles such. Laurillard, 1. 99. We wanted. experiential learning, with students making choices as they would. This led us to design the simulation of a software house called. Open Software Solutions (OSS). The course case studies are. OSS staff and the student. The tasks set by the project manager for each. M8. 80 and the CCI Programme. M8. 80 Software Engineering is a 2. UK. 3. 0- credit points) course studied over 6 months. It forms part of. Computing for Commerce and Industry (CCI) Postgraduate Diploma. MSc offered by the Computing Department. The CCI programme is aimed at software professionals who. Students are sent a pack of course materials to. Each student is assigned to a. Learning is. paced through four assignments marked by the tutor according to. M8. 80 course team. For M8. 80 students the pack of course materials contains: 1. This. material includes small exercises to allow students to practice. The. case studies, and feedback on the exercises students are asked to. Open Software Solutions (OSS). This environment is the main focus of this. Study of the two aspects of the course - . The course itself covers 1. The. Nature of Software, Software Quality Management, Software. Development Lifecycles, Requirements Specification, Software. Design, Testing, Maintenance, Software Reuse, Planning and. Management, Human Factors, Professional Issues, and Software. Process Review. 2. Case Study Design. A key question for the design of the environment which we asked. With every design point we considered, we wanted to be sure. Design considerations. From the predecessor course, we knew that our students had. In this same spirit, we decided to allow. This allowed students to repeat the case study. To reinforce the. We thereby hoped to. For educational purposes, students require formative feedback. So we decided to offer feedback. The. disadvantage is that students do not receive tailored feedback. In the spirit of conceptual interaction, tasks needed to be. The tasks had to be challenging and set in the. This led us to design a variety of. We considered a variety of company structures and. A more detailed explanation of the student tasks. Section 4. 2. 2 Open Software Solutions. Open Software Solutions (OSS) is a small company founded in 1. OSS provides the. The CIRCE project involves many teams of developers and. OSS assisted the Open University in. The OSS. project team consists of the manager, Bill Haley, and the student. It fulfils the. requirement of a project that is too large and complex for a single. This project involves software to control. This. is a real- time domain with safety properties. OSS is using the. The OSS project team consists of the. Tricia Bailey, and the student. This M8. 80 case study is. OSS is developing. Summer. Sun that will enable customers to select package. Summer. Sun offers. The. short- term aim of the project is to deliver this system, but there. The approach being taken to the development is a. OSS `in- house' life- cycle model. The OSS project team. Aswin Nakhwa, a programmer Jo Richards, and. This M8. 80 case study was developed from an. This project has been used. OSS case study were developed specifically for M8. The OSS project team. OSS's technical director and project manager, Bronwen. Davies, and the student. This M8. 80 case study was based on the. Interface Design for the OSS Environment. We wanted the system to be as engaging as possible, and. Alty and. Bergan, 1. Riddle, 1. 99. 0). Myst from. Broderbund Software. Inc and Cyan Inc, 5. Redwood Blvd, Novato, Ca.), and we drew on. The final environment is not like. Knowing that our students are very focused and simply would. We went through. several cycles of evaluation and change using story- boards. In. particular the general screen layout evolved through various. In addition, the course is aimed at. This creates an. interesting set of design trade- offs. We wanted to stay within the software house metaphor as far as. For example, we initially required the user to `go. The overall screen layout is shown in Figure 1. The top two. thirds is a `window' into an OSS project through which students. OSS staff and access project resources. The. other third is a control panel with the `quick keys', a button to. The buttons. on the left depend on the project room, and transport the user to. OSS offices, for example to interview the client. This can be used to take notes, receive feedback from the. Figure 1 Screen layout (showing the Production Cell. Each project within OSS has its own floor in the building. On each floor, the perspective of the user is of someone. Moving the cursor towards the. Each. project floor has basically the same layout, and contains the. Which resources are included depends. The main screen colour is grey, and hotspots are indicated by. A. pointing hand shows that the item will respond to being clicked on. The rest of the. time, the cursor shows a drum icon which rotates at the edges of. The interaction possible matches real- world expectations. Books. can be taken from the shelf, placed on the desk, and opened for. CASE tools and prototypes. In. addition, all the documents can be printed. In principle things can be done in any order, but we provide. On entering the multimedia, the. OSS which contains a noticeboard. OSS, the receptionist Patrick, and. Figure 2). Students can look around reception, and. Patrick who welcomes them to OSS. They can go up to any. Figure 2 Part of the reception showing the lift door. OSS organisational chart. Each project manager provides further guidance through pop- up. OSS Projects and Tasks. Each project has its own set of resources for the student to use. Each project manager provides instructions. The workbook has also been pre- loaded with a. In. addition the company has a library of materials (see Figure 3). OSS uses the. two CASE (Computer- Aided Software Engineering) tools which are used. These are Select Yourdon (to. Select. Enterprise (to support the object- oriented lifecycle using UML. Figure 3 The library on the fifth floor contains. In this section we describe the student tasks in more. CIRCE (1. 5 hours of study) - floor one. This project involves three tasks: 1 Familiarity: a chance to get some general. Method: an evaluation of the OUPRINCE and. OUSDM methods developed for CIRCE; 3 Interface design: an evaluation of the. CIRCE. The first task requires students to read a general description. CIRCE (located in the filing cabinet), and to look at a slide. These two items. provide an introduction to the project as a whole in order to give. The second task requires the student to compare a set of. The. Open University. The criteria were originally developed to guide. OUPRINCE and OUSDM) do indeed meet the. Bill, the project manager, has broken the task down into. In the first sub- task, students gain familiarity. To achieve this, the filing cabinet contains. This team will include. The course. materials emphasise that it would not be appropriate to ask the. The next two sub- tasks require the student to interview a set of. Figure 4 shows the screen for the interview with the. The notebook contains 3. These questions and answers are. CIRCE project on which the case study is. In all, there are 1. In the final sub- task, students. Figure 4 Meeting with a CIRCE project team, showing. The third task requires the student to evaluate the interface. CIRCE office) with the design of the old system (illustrated by a. Figure 5), and screen dumps of the. The filing cabinet contains the interface design. A screen shot from the video illustrating. Production Cell (1. OSS is using this project to train staff in object- oriented. The Production Cell is designed to. There are seven tasks here: familiarity, use cases, events. Z presentation. The. Figure 6). The simulation is a key resource in this project and is. Use cases, events, statecharts and operations. UML modelling which students are taught through. The events, operations, safety properties and. Z presentation tasks are supported by a slide presentation, each of. Students also. can use the Select Enterprise CASE tool to draw the UML diagrams. There are several. The safety properties task requires students to analyse the. The Z presentation task asks students to produce. Z specification for the production cell. This project. applies directly the modelling, notations and requirements analysis. Figure 6 The Production Cell simulation. Summer. Sun (3. 0 hours of study) - floor three. The Summer. Sun project shows the student how various techniques.
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