Your boss calls your team into his office. Sam asks the team to identify and investigate possible gene-sequencing software products that the company could develop. He asks your team to prepare a technical report on the possibilities and to present your findings to management in two weeks.
Sam makes it perfectly clear that "We develop software. We don't do biology!" "We don't want to invest in a lot of new biology laboratory equipment."
In this assignment, the team needs to identify possible features of a software product any way they can. The team should brain storm on possible approaches to finding candidate features. For example, the team could look at ads in appropriate biology journals, scan your article reviews for ideas, look for tools on the web or ask a biologist. Your team will also want to perform a specialized literature search. It is important to keep a record of the source of each idea for later use in the project, for example, record the article title and page number.
For each candidate, your report should have a short description of what is envisioned, a description of it functionality, and why it might be a feature in a product for the company. These descriptions should be in general terms without a lot of details. Do not try to justify or evaluate a candidate on its worth. That will be done later. This assignment is to generate a long list of possibilities. You may decide later to select something which is not even on this list.
Assignment 4 is the submission of a draft of the technical study by class time Wednesday October 1, 1997. I will promptly provide written feedback to the team. Assignment 4 will NOT be graded. Assignment 5 is the final version and is due Wednesday October 8. It will be graded. Use the CSCI 475 web page "How To Write a Research Paper" as a guideline. Also, see EG139 notes off of the CSCI 475 home page.
Also, during class time on October 8, your team will have fifteen to twenty minutes to present your findings.
This assignment is leading up to the next step which is a feasibility study. In a feasibility study, one narrows the possibilities and evaluates each of the prime candidates. A large portion of your technical report will be the background section of the feasibility study report.