CSci 435/535: Software Engineering

Homework 1: Project Ideas

Due Friday, January 18th by 11am

This is a brainstorming exercise for the project. Arrange yourselves into groups of 4 or 5. Meet as a group to come up with 3 great ideas for the class project. Elect someone to "sell" the ideas on Friday.

Only one your ideas can be a game. If you propose a game it must be innovative—Scrabble or World of Warcraft will not do. For example, check out the demos of "Spore" at http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=spore. You may want to get ideas from games made with gaming frameworks such as the ones at http://wiki.gamegardens.com/Main_Page and http://jmonkeyengine.com.

With regard to non-games, think about applications that exploit network effects that the Internet provides. Also think about new mobile devices that are coming out, and platforms to support them such as Google's Android or Apple's iPhone SDK. Try to choose a project that is genuinely useful. Talk to people you know about their software needs.

Here are some good qualities of a project:

• It should be large enough for 20 people to work on.
• It should have requirements that build upon each other, so that a functional "base version" can be created in the first milestone, then enhanced in later milestones.
• It should be fun and interesting.
• It should not require specialized domain expertise, such as chemistry knowledge. (If there is, see if this risk can be reduced.)
• There should be no serious "bottlenecks" in development that would cause many people to wait.
• It should not be a past course project.

Examples of past projects include a command-line PAR2 program (not fun, required specialized knowledge), a billiards game with 2D and 3D views (fun, but required physics and simulation knowledge), a traffic simulator (fun, not too much specialized knowledge), a turn-based strategy game (fun, not too much specialized knowledge), a fantasy basketball game with sabatoge attacks (fun, learned PHP).

Grading

25 points total