M253: TEAM WORKING IN DISTRIBUTED ENVIRONMENTS

TUTOR MARKED ASSIGNMENT
Cut-Off Date: 01 – May- 2017
Total Marks: 100
Marks Scored:
What to submit
Each page of each document you submit should be headed with the title of the TMA, your name and your personal identifier, for example:
M253 TMA 1
Ahmad Hasan
04321
You should submit one zipped file which contains the following two files: One file should contain your individual response (Questions 1) and the second file should contain the team response (Questions, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6). The two files should be named TMA01-YourName-YourID-individual and TMA01-YourName-YourID-team respectively. Please number the pages in each file.
The zipped file should be in the following format:
M253‐TMA01‐Semester‐Year‐YourBranch‐YourID‐YourName
Plagiarism Warning:
As per AOU rules and regulations, all students are required to submit their own TMA work and avoid plagiarism. The AOU has implemented sophisticated techniques for plagiarism detection. You must provide all references in case you use and quote another person's work in your TMA. You will be penalized for any act of plagiarism as per the AOU's rules and regulations.
Declaration of No Plagiarism by Student (to be signed and submitted by student with TMA work):
I hereby declare that this submitted TMA work is a result of my own efforts and I have not plagiarized any other person's work. I have provided all references of information that I have used and quoted in my TMA work.
Name of Student:
Signature:
Date:
2
SCENARIO
Imagine that you and the other members of your team are employed by a small firm of computer software consultants known as Soft Solutions. Soft Solutions offers a range of systems design and development services, although for larger projects it contracts out system development to others.
When developing a system in response to a successful proposal, teams are usually put together depending upon the skills needed by the project and employees’ availability.
An invitation to work on a system design project has been received from a Small University (see below). This invitation was received at a very busy time for Soft Solutions so the project team was assembled only on the basis of availability to work on the project, rather than the skills that might be required. Due to commitments to other projects that each of you will be working on, you will be unable to meet, regularly, face-to-face during the course of the project. Soft Solutions has therefore decided that your team will work as a distributed team, communicating electronically.
Soft Solutions sees distributed working as a way to be more flexible in creating project teams and hopes this will enable them to respond more effectively to new clients. Your employer has already been encouraging employees, as professional practitioners, to keep a reflective journal. They now wish to extend this idea to teams and to encourage team reflection at key stages of the project. They would like the team reflection to be used in creating reports to describe and evaluate the team working on this current project.
University Resource Scheduler
Your team has been assigned to handle a new client called Small University.
The small university currently manages all its resource allocation and management manually, this often results in classes and exams being scheduled at the same venue, causing confusion and dissatisfaction among staff and students. Being a new and small university, the university cannot afford, very complex and expensive scheduling software. Therefore, the university management has decided to approach soft solutions for a simple and economical solution to its scheduling problems, with options of enhancement as the University grows in size.
The management of the university has decided that the system should provide the following functionalities:
 The system should provide a means of entering and storing department, class, instructor, building and classroom information.
 Schedules should be created using a number of parameters in mind, including classroom size, instructor availability, type of classroom, resources required for the lecture etc.
 The system should generate online and printable versions of the schedule and provide proper detailed error messages in case schedules cannot be created according to the selected parameters.
 Provide a web interface for staff to request resource allocation, like halls, or room for exams etc.
3
When designing the system, it should be kept in mind that the system is intended for use by the university administration employees who have no prior knowledge of working with similar software. Therefore, the interface will have to be simple to use and robust, providing guidance at every stage of use and on-line help.
The small university management approaches your employers to undertake an investigation of their current and future needs and identify possible ways of addressing these needs. Your employers have agreed to undertake this study in two stages, which will be advised to you in the Activity Sheet for each of the two milestones in this course, and are summarized in the Road Map.
END OF SCENARIO