General Exercise Recommendations

Students Work in Small Teams

I recommend that students meet in small groups of three to four to do the exercise work. Soft skill topics - such as A&D - that involve a multiplicity of heuristics, possible solutions, new terms, and new activities are best applied and understood by talking through the exercises with peers (one group member acting as scribe). However, I recognize that team projects present other challenges in a college setting, such as difficulty in coordinating group meetings and uneven participation among group members. If you have formal labs, this is a good time to have students work in small teams.

Should You Use CASE Tools?

A&D output (or in this case student project output) consists mostly of diagrams. These are fussy and time-consuming for the students to do, but very important. Students should avoid using a CASE tool. Although such tools sound appealing (especially in SE-oriented courses, where there is a desire to expose students to this stuff), I have observed that the learning curve and small screen size inhibit students' creativity, depth of investigation, and willingness to modify and refine. Time is misspent wrestling with the tool, not mastering intellectual skills in A&D. I suggest students do all their brainstorming and drawings on transparencies using a washable marker. This enhances the team members' participation when used with a projector during their meetings and allows for easy erasing with a damp cloth. In addition, the output can be readily photocopied to paper (and reduced when necessary) for submission or sharing.

Five-Day Industry Courses

When I teach this subject as a 5-day industry course, I do several case study exercises with my students, one being the problem covered in the book: a point-of-sale application. Others case studies may include a robotic control system for printed circuit board chip stuffing, an airline reservation system, a game of Monopoly, a game of Minesweeper, and a call processing telecom switch or router. My personal favorite for sheer fun and richness is Monopoly - it seems to contain the entire spectrum of analysis and design problems when you dig really deep and can be nicely factored in increasingly complex development cycles in terms of requirements. It suffers, however, from bearing little resemblance to any problem the students will encounter in their careers (unless they join Parker Brothers!).