Project Graverobber
Background
This project comes to us from the staff of the parish cemeteries in Shamokin, PA who are seeking help with an existing software platform. It was originally created and maintained by the late John Haile to catalogue all of the graves and burials in the cemeteries. After his passing, the parish could not continue using the program and needs help to continue his work. They would like us to take his existing program and update and or use elements of it to create a program that will help the parish continue their work. There are many resources at hand including John’s old CD’s and the existing program that would help the team begin the continuation of his work.
Executive Summary
In this situation, we are lucky in that there is potential to use an existing solution that John had created. First, the team that takes on this challenge would have to look at the program that John created, and see if it is something worth building off of. If so, then studying the code and trying to fix and upgrade it would be a great solution to this problem. The first goal would be to fix the program and get it working again, then try to add functionality to the program and make it mobile so that gravesites could be updated as more burials occur. This project seems like a great option and would be put to good use by the parish staff.
Viability Analysis
The difficulties involved here include the fact that there is a lot of investigating to do here; first in meeting with John’s wife and examining his CDs and other documents so that the group is knowledgable about his work. Then, it would take some time to read his code and understand how the program works, in order to fix it up. There could be time constraints with all of this, but I think think that these challenges can be overcome.
Risks and Rewards
This project is risky in that the group might spend absorbent amounts of time looking through John’s work and less time working on the project, but it would be extremely rewarding to complete his work and help out the parish staff. It is very valuable in industry to be able to read source code (or someone’s code who came before you), understand it, and then work with it. This could be a great exercise for senior design students as it would prepare them for the real world. Also, the fact that we could help a group who needs it makes the work more meaningful and would reward the students even more.
Closing
Overall, I believe that this is a worthwhile project for students to take on. It involves updating and upgrading someone else’s work, which is a very valuable skill to develop. Also, it would be extremely meaningful as it would help out the parish staff who would not know how to complete the project otherwise, and would use the program frequently. There is potential room for growth because as soon as the group figures out how to get the program working, they can do all sorts of work in terms of upgrading the system (creating databases, making the program accessible on mobile devices, etc.). This would be a great project for students to work on.
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