Homework #2 - Design Review Worksheet: 10 November 1999 at noon

Design Review: 11 November 1999

Homework #3 - Design Review Reflection: 16 November 1999

GOAL:

The purpose of this assignment is to prepare for and participate in a Design Review. A professional software engineer must be comfortable giving and receiving critiques of their designs. The Design Review process is designed to help you develop and hone these skills. The design review also allows you a chance to ask questions about and receive feedback on your design so that you can make adjustments, corrections, and changes before the Design Document is due.

Homework #2 - Design Review Worksheet

DUE: 10 November 1999 before 12:00 PM (Noon)

GOAL:

For a Software Design Review to be successful, all participants must come to the review meeting informed and knowledgeable about the system they will be commenting on. The goal of the Design Review Worksheet is to provide a synopsis of your project so that the Design Review participants can become familiar with your project (and you with theirs) before the review session.

DESCRIPTION:

Group Component:

Write a 1-2 page synopsis of your design project. Be sure to include the following information:

• Design Project Overview: A short (~ 5 sentence) description of the educational game you are designing.
•  Completed Design Decisions: List 3 design decisions you have already made, and provide the rationale (i.e. reasons) for each decision
•  Future Design Decisions: List 3 design decisions that you are still struggling with/working on

TURNIN: E-mail a HTML version of the design project synopsis to allison@cc by 12:00 PM Wednesday, 11 November, 1999.

Design Review

DUE: 11 November 1999

GOAL: The goal of the Design Review is to give and receive feedback on the educational game you are designing. The review serves two purposes: to provide experience in giving and receiving technical designcritiques and to provide feedback on individual design projects that can be incorporated into the final DesignDocument deliverable.

DESCRIPTION:

Individual Component:

• Read all of the Design Review Worksheets, which will be posted to the class web-site by Wednesday, November 10, 1999.
• Bring to class a list of 5 comments about the design projects described by the Design Review worksheets. (Be sure to include comments about projects other than those that you have worked on or are currently working on.)
• In class, circulate among the design projects, asking questions and providing critiques and other information about your classmates design projects.

Prepare a poster about your design project that displays information that you would like to talk about. It would be reasonable to include some set of the following information, although feel free to include other kinds of information that you would like to discuss with your peers and colleagues:
 

• General design project overview, probably best displayed with a storyboard/screen shot of the general game, or a brief statement (i.e. a couple of sentences) about the game.
• Some representation about the design decisions you have already made, with accompanying logic, where appropriate;
• Some representation that easily conveys the design decisions that you are still struggling with

Note: It is important that you spend some time thinking about which aspects of your design project you wish to discuss, and figure out a way to present that information so that it best encourages discussion. I am expecting more than 3 PowerPoint slides with the information turned in for Homework #2. However, I will allow a good deal of flexibility when it comes to how that information is presented. Do keep in mind that you are producing artifacts for public viewing and discussion and that the information should be large enough and clear enough for a group of people to see and discuss it.

• Each group should provide a notebook where individuals can leave design comments
• Each group should make sure someone from their design team is with their project at all times, althoughthat person should change through the design review session so that everyone has a chance to visit other design projects.

Individual Component: Typed list of comments about design projects, due at the beginning of class.  (You need to bring two copies of this, one to turn in to me, and the other to keep with you as you circulate around the room.)

Group Component: Design Review Poster to be displayed in class

Homework #3 - Design Review Reflection

DUE: 16 November 1999

GOAL: Part of the overall educational experience is making sure that we take a moment to look back at what we have done and see what we have learned from our experience. The goal of the Design Review Reflection is for each member of the design team to inventory of what they have learned in the Design Review process.

DESCRIPTION:

Individual Component:

• Read all of the comments that we offered to your group during the Design Review
• Write a paper about what you learned through the design review process. You should include:
• What you learned about your design
• How the comments and feedback effected your design (i.e. were design decisions reinforced,  changed, was a different perspective examined that you hadn't looked at before, etc.)
• You may also include a discussion of the design review process itself - not a critique of the process alone, but relate the experience of participating in the design to things you learned. (i.e. "I realized that having to prepare a poster helped us finalize some design decisions that we had postponed". Or "Talking to other teams about their design decisions helped me realize that we had forgotten to think  about how XYZ relates to our design project.")