Software Design and Development
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The Power project
What is a solution package?
In the HSC Software Design and Development course you have to develop a solution package to solve a given software problem. Quite likely, you will have a few small projects to work on in both the Preliminary course and the HSC course. Students normally are given a large scale project to work on for most of year 12.
For this project you would normally follow the software development cycle that is outlined in your syllabus. There are four types of software development approaches mentioned in the syllabus (and you must know each type well). They are:
- the structured approach (often also called the waterfall approach)
- the prototyping approach
- the rapid applications software development approach (RAD)
- the end user approach.
The syllabus, however, is designed around the structured approach in its way of describing software development. The structured or waterfall approach has the following steps that define how software can be created. They are:
- define
- understand
- plan and design
- implement
- test and evaluation
- maintain.
This approach is called the structured or waterfall approach because usually each stage takes a defined or planned period of time and you do not progress to the next stage of the software development until you have finalised the previous stage.
This is why a Gantt chart is useful in this software design methodology as you clearly show each stage and when it should start and finish. The waterfall analogy is also very useful here in picturing this approach. If you think of each step in the structured approach as a series of cascades in a waterfall, you soon realise that going down the waterfall is a one-way path. Similarly, the structured approach is also a one-way path.
What is the Power project?
The Power project is a case study of a project that was done for the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney. The Power project team wanted to create a software solution so that items from the database of information held at the Powerhouse Museum on many of their items could be presented in a better way on web pages. It was a complex task.
The case study documents the team's goals and the structured way in which they carried out the project. It fits in really well with the software design and development course, as a real life example of how a software team went about creating a new piece of software to solve a new problem.
The documentation about the Power project can be found at the Powerhouse Museum's web site. It can be used for HSC students who want an example of a structured project, or the questions and problems on the site could be the basis of a class exercise or assignment.
To go to the Power project click here 
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Page prepared by Trevor Gunter
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