Briefly summarize The Gaming Room client and their software requirements. Who was the client? What type of software did they want you to design?
This project was for the client of the Gaming Room who wanted us to develop the Server-Client system for their game called Draw It or Lose It. The requirements for this project required a singleton structure to hold only one instance of any game at a time. The desires for this project were to allow multiple different user platforms use the product at the same time with the Server-Client design pattern.
In this project, I believe that I used my past knowledge of operating systems and computer systems very well to address the potential hardware and system requirements for The Gaming Room. Having a great deal of previous knowledge of operating systems and computer hardware gave me a solid understanding on what may best suit the needs for the system being asked for.
What about the process of working through a design document did you find helpful when developing the code?
I found the most helpful parts of the design document for developing the code was developoing the UML diagrams that we used to actually create code from. Having the visual representation of the project as a whole made it much easier to understand where certain aspects should go and how the related to each other.
If you could choose one part of your work on these documents to revise, what would you pick? How would you improve it?
I believe the recommendations section could have been revised and done better. I believe if more time and resources were given for this section of the project then I would have been able to assess the true benefits and downsides of each operating system. Having limited time and resources for each of these sections made them particularly difficult to feel confident in my own knowledge.
How did you interpret the user’s needs and implement them into your software design? Why is it so important to consider the user’s needs when designing?
I interpreted the users needs largely on the cost of business. I tried to ensure that the cost of doing business was taken into consideration at every aspect of this project. This includes looking at the different hardware that may be able to be saved on, the different platforms that could be used and constantly trying to find the best solution for any hardware and software needs that fit the goal of the app and the goal of saving the company money.
How did you approach designing software? What techniques or strategies would you use in the future to analyze and design a similar software application?
The software design was largely done with only using the Singleton design pattern and the Server-Client design pattern. In the future I would hope to have more experience with different design patterns and different frameworks to know which would fit the situation the best. With this class it didn't teach realistic use-cases for each design pattern, but very simple use-cases and not a lot of practice on how to properly use them. Additionally the software writing and designing process was entirely taken out of our hands, giving us easy snippets of code to fill into annotated spots, while not having an understanding of the code around it. I would want a better understanding of the code being used, rather then just filling in code and hoping it works.