Issues with implementation based design and the classical mistakes of software engineering : a case study on the development of a web parser

• Main Author: Garg, Shiva.
• Other Authors: Kevin Anthony Jones
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2011
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Computer science and engineering::Software::Software engineering; DRNTU::Engineering::Computer science and engineering::Computer applications::Administrative data processing
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/43881
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

The problem involved the development of an application to extract textual information from web pages of Wiki CPE207 of the course SC/CPE 207 Software Engineering. This involved searching for a selectable and changeable reference set of student names fed in from MS Excel. The purpose of the application was to aid in determining the level of participation of the students enrolled in the course, so that the course lecturer has an automated system to gauge the contribution level of the students. This project project evolved into a case study wherein an initial implementation was developed and new requirements were added on to increase the scope of the project. However, subsequent environmental changes (Blackboard upgrade from Blackboard 8 to Blackboard 9) led to the failure of this initial implementation due to its dependency on Blackboard’s internal authentication mechanism. The report presents an investigation into the causes of the failure of this initial implementation.