User Manual & Design Review
The objective of this assignment is to give you experience conducting a formal review.
The central activity of this assignment is to hold a review meeting at which all of your team members will meet to conduct a detailed, formal review of your development team’s User Manual and Design Document. In preparation for this meeting, each team member should spend a couple of hours individually reviewing and marking up their copy of the documents. Once each team member has completed their individual review, the entire team should meet together and conduct a formal review of the documents. During the review meeting you should make notes on each section of the documents, including problems that were found and recommended improvements. To avoid being totally negative, you can even include praise for parts that are particularly well done, if you desire. After the review meeting, the results of the review should be documented in a report that provides specific feedback to the development team on the quality of their work. The notes taken during the review meeting will provide the raw material from which the final report will be written. A copy of your report will be given to the development team so they can incorporate your feedback into their User Manual and Design Document.
The User Manual and Design Document should be evaluated based on the criteria given in the User Manual and Design assignments (i.e., Assignments 1 and 3). These criteria are repeated here for your convenience:
“Your user manual will
be graded based on how effectively it helps a novice user learn to install and
use your FCS program. It will be judged
on completeness (did you leave anything out?), and on the clarity of its
explanations. The goal is to teach
people how to use your software. Making
your manual fancy is less important than making it communicate effectively.”
“Your design will be
evaluated on the following criteria:
1)
Effective
communication with the reader
2)
Traceability
to the PRD and Functional Specification
3)
Effective
application of good software design principles
4)
Effective
application of architecture and design patterns
5)
Effective use
of UML diagrams
6)
Testability”
Four hard copies of your review report (one for me, and one for each member of the development team).
Your review report will be graded based on the thoroughness of the review, the usefulness of the feedback, and the clarity of the report.