Week 2 wrap up:
There were some very good contributions to the Project Management Software and Application Research threads.  You discovered a number of Project Management Software packages including some that were specifically designed to support the extreme programming methodology. When I first discovered the world of Open Source, I was amazed at the variety of software that I could download and “play with” for free.  If you ever want to do this, the site http://www.sourceforge.net is a great place to start. There are over 160,000 projects in progress on this site.

You also made some interesting discoveries about what is available in the application software market including “on demand” software from salesforce.com. Salesforce.com software can be hosted on servers belonging to salesforce.com and customers pay to use it based on how much they actually use the software as opposed to paying a large up-front licensing fee and installing the software on their own hardware.

You also may have noticed that I have a bias to avoid building software myself if it can be avoided.  This is a paradox because I really enjoy building new software.

Week 3 welcome:
The material you are reading this week is probably the most important material in the course.  You learn about Use Cases in Chapter 7.  The techniques in this Chapter help us nail down the scope of the system that we are going to build.  Chapter 8 covers Data Analysis.  Data drives what is possible to build.  Incorrect or incomplete Data Analysis leads to very expensive repairs and delays later in the project. The Entity Relationship Diagram is my favorite systems development document.  In a small amount of space, it contains very significant information about what the system can and cannot do.

There is only one Discussion Thread this week.  This gives you time to concentrate on the critical material in Chapters 7 and 8.  If for any reason you have a problem working the CASE tools you find while doing your research work for the Discussion, you could consider using a drawing tool such as Microsoft Word or Visio instead of a “real” CASE tool. 

The homework gives you a chance to develop an Entity Relationship Diagram yourself. This homework problem will appear on Blackboard today (Thursday) or tomorrow (Friday).