Missing design documents

[dacb]

I didn't find any design documents in the .doc directory. Make sure you place them in there.

For the component and functional spec... The functional spec is essentially the use cases. I like to write use cases by first creating a number of "user stories" that describe the specific user types, e.g.

Alice is an experimentalist who will be using the tool to analyze her data.  She has limited programming experience but is an expert user of tools like Excel and instrumentation control software.

Then, for each user type, enumerate the specific use cases, e.g.,

* Alice will use this software to load her raw EIS data into the database.
* Alice will use raw EIS data in the database to create a Nyquist plot.
* Alice will use the user interface to select multiple Nyquist plots to show simultaneously.

I realize these might not match your software, but I just wanted to put in some examples.

For the component specification, use the use cases and things mentioned in them to create components. E.g., in the above there are two top level components that come up right away:

1. A database
2. A user interface
   But there are likely many more and some that are sub-components of the above. For each component, you can use the following template to create a component 'card' in the form:

* Name
* What it does
* Inputs (with type information)
* Outputs (with type information)
* How it interacts with other components