William (Bill) Cabral ~wcabral 2/2/2005 CS190 Project Requirements Document The Football Idea -=Overview=- Brown Football recruits over 10,000 students annually, through mass-mailed recruitment questionnaires that gather information about the athletes' academic and athletic histories. Approximately thirty percent of the targeted high school students return a completed questionnaire. All of the data gathered must then be manually entered into a Filemaker database, which is updated with three to four thousand new entries per year. Some employees at the football office have suggested that an online recruitment system could save the program time and money, as more high school students gain the computer skills necessary to make them comfortable completing their questionnaire over the internet. Paper questionnaires would be sent to prospective recruits, and they would have the choice of mailing back their questionnaire or submitting the online form. Information collected through the surveys would be automatically added to the database of recruits, saving the time and effort of the data entry. Ideally, checks would also be added to catch duplicate or erroneous entries. This proposed system would prove extremely useful, and could be easily modified to assist other Brown recruiting offices. -=Target Users=- There are two classes of users for this proposed project: * High school football players (primarily juniors) and their parents (if the recruit is under 18) would be using the web end of the project. They would be viewing the web form and completing the questionnaire with the appropriate information. * Coaches and secretaries in Brown's Football Office would be the primary users of the database containing the recruits' information. Currently, coaches receive copies of the questionnaires filled out by the students who wish to play a given position (i.e. the Lineman Coach receives questionnaires for potential linemen). The new system would eliminate these paper questionnaires, and the coaches would be able to print Filemaker records for their desired position/athlete. -=Requirements=- * Simple and straightforward user interface (web form) * Must be accessible to high school students with varying levels of computer skills. * Must collect all of the information specified in the paper questionnaire that will be mailed out. * Must include appropriate disclaimers and instructions. * Students will be submitting social security numbers, so this must be authorized by a parent if the student is under 18. * Should note that recruitment questionnaire does not qualify as an official application to Brown; state specific function of the form. * Project should be able to be completed in C++ on Sun Machines. * Some scripting might be needed for the web part of the project, but anything else can most likely be done in C++. * Project should be able to be scaled up to a PC product. * In researching other college's approaches to recruitment, I have found that many have looked to outside corporations to provide them with the precise services that this proposal would provide, so clearly this is a marketable idea. * Project must be easily divisible * There are some distinct parts of the program that could be rather easily divisible (web functionality, web design, database integration, etc), but there may not be enough here for 10 people. -=Feasibility=- I believe that this project could easily be completed to fit the stated needs of the users. In fact, I am not sure that the proposal, in its current form, would be involved enough to warrant a ten person group and a semester long project. I do no personally know how difficult it would be to create the database that the project requires, but it should not be an insurmountable roadblock. It is my opinion that to garner serious consideration, some brainstorming would have to be done to expand this project in one way or another. The folks in the Football Office did not have any suggestions regarding possible extensions. -=Testing=- The group would need to test a solution to this project that included multiple simultaneous accesses of the program. As previously stated, the maximum number of total web users could hit three to four thousand annually, though it is improbable that all applicants would choose to complete their questionnaire online. Sources interviewed suggested that they tend to receive completed questionnaires in bunches, corresponding with their major mailings, so the potential is there to have up to a thousand completed forms within a timespan of approximately a week. Test cases would also need to be included that checked for duplicate or erroneous entries (e.g. if the social security number was 3 digits long, or text instead of numbers). -=External Dependencies=- There are some external dependencies that would need to be resolved in a final, working project. Integrating the proposed project with the existing Filemaker database would require some cooperation from the people in the Football Office. Deploying the final version on the web would require the authorization and help of the webpage administrator. Sources in the football office did not seem to have much faith in the reliability of the administrator, citing various requests for basic maintenance that have not been acted upon (most notably, the removal of a Running Backs coach's name that has not been employed at Brown for over a year). Finally, we must have the ability to execute scripts on the server that would be used, assuming such scripts are implemented in the final design. -=Conclusion=- The Football Idea is a very doable project, given the group size and the timetable. It may be too simple in its current proposed state, but that in itself could cause some interesting problems within the group. Also, its limited nature would allow it to emerge at the end of the semester as a very polished, useful tool that could be adapted for use by other sports office at Brown. The requirements of the project fit the requirements of the course very well.