CS 257: Software Design

Web Application: user stories and database design

Folder: webapp/doc

You will work with your web application team for this assignment.

For this assignment, you will finalize your choice of dataset for the web application, and start exploring the structure and capabilities of your data.

Your tasks

Create a text file dataset.txt in your webapp/doc directory. In this file, include:

• Your names
• A brief description of your dataset. Include instructions for how to get the dataset (typically, just a URL and maybe a note about where to click should do the job).
• For each table in your database design, the SQL CREATE statement that you will use to create the table. Here's an example from my authors & books database:
  CREATE TABLE authors ( id SERIAL, last_name TEXT, first_name TEXT, birth_year INT, death_year INT );
• [Optional] If you want to include any discussion of your database design, go ahead.

• A list of user stories you would like to support in the final version of your web application. For each user story, include the user story itself (using one of the structures included in the Common templates section of the Wikipedia article on user stories), plus a brief description of how this user story might be implemented on your website. For example:

  STORY: As a tennis fan, I can get a list of all the winners of the Wimbledon women's singles championship, so I can figure out whether Serena Williams won more times than Martina Navratilova. IMPLEMENTATION: One simple way (maybe not the best way—we're still thinking about it) to support this would be to have a drop-down list for tournaments, in which the user could select Wimbledon, and another drop-down for sub-tournaments (women's singles, women's doubles, men's singles, etc.), and maybe a third for what information I want (champions, all participants in a specific year, etc.). Kind of clunky, but it would work. STORY: As a Senate campaign staffer, I can get demographic and voting data about a county in my state so I can help plan advertising and campaign events. IMPLEMENTATION: We could have a county map of the state, and the user could hover over a county to get quick summary data, or click on a county to go to a page with more detailed current and historical information.

A note about requirements

If this were a course entitled "Software Engineering", we would spend a fair amount of time studying requirements engineering. Roughly, requirements engineering is the process of figuring out what your product is supposed to do, and writing it down clearly and completely. The goal is to enable the implementers and testers to do their jobs so that they create the desired product at the end. As you might imagine, requirements engineering is very hard to do well, and has been researched extensively. It's a huge topic, well worth studying.

Because our web app project is quite structured and the Carleton term is very short, I've chosen to go with an extremely light-weight approach to the gathering of requirements. Specifically, we're using our user stories, brainstormed by the developers (you) without talking to the intended audience. This is not even a normal approach to creating user stories, which would normally involve getting all the potential stakeholders together for a brainstorming session. User stories are, in fact, mostly a tool for allowing developers and non-developer clients/customers/users to talk together about the goals and visions for an up-coming software project. But even a more formally developed set of user stories would not be a sufficient requirements process for the vast majority of software projects.

So keep that in mind in the future (e.g. CS comps). User stories are a great way to start thinking about the needs of your users, which is why I'm having you write them. But they're not a replacement for a more thorough requirements-gathering process.

Have fun!