What Do We Know Right Now

Some not entirely random thoughts and questions regarding the RADAR project.

What do we know right now before talking to the "customer" (Brendan Dolan, ResLife)? What can we model now? What detail can we start to sketch in regarding overall system architecture?

Let me take a stab at these questions. Hopefully, my thoughts can jump start your thinking.

You have the reports that ResLife currently uses. They pretty much define what it is we need to produce. They may not be perfect buy they start to tell a lot of the story.

1. How can we model these reports? Is there an abstraction we can apply that will allow us to proceed not knowing precisely what ResLife wants and capable of easily comprehending changes?
   
2. How do we persist report data? Flat file? PDF? XML? Relational Database? Which approach is easiest? Which approach is amenable to post-processing, ie. trend analysis, general queries? Do we need to support such queries? Can we design for such support without committing to it upfront?
   
3. Who are the actors in our system? RAs. Hall Directors. How do they interact with the system? How are they notified of 'events'?
   
4. Can we model students and buildings and areas in a quick way to get something up and running?
5. Basic Question: What can we build NOW with imperfect knowledge?

I think we know most about reports. I think that is a good place to start. How do we model them? How do we move them around? How do we persist them? How do we generate them?

Start thinking in terms of Reports NOT in terms of this report or that report.