Overview: The Case Study

Introduction 

In the UPEDU, many artifacts are derived from a project case study and are used as examples or templates. These examples can be used as a starting point on how to use the artifact templates and give you a better understanding of the artifacts themselves. The following sections explain briefly what is the Case-Study and how you can visualize these examples in the UPEDU.

Case-Study: TMT (Time Monitoring Tool) 

Brief overview of the TMT

The software system produced is a Time Monitoring Tool, which is referred to as "TMT".

The Time Monitoring Tool allows developers working within a defined software development process to record the time spent on the various software development activities, such as designing, coding, testing, or debugging. The TMT also allows a manager to derive analyses and produce reports based on the data entered in the system.

The TMT can be used in any software development application to record the resources spent on the various software development activities. The TMT records the various activities being done. The goals are manifolds depending on the users of the data. The developers use TMT to record the activities that are being performed. The managers use data recorded from TMT to validate its planning, budgets and schedules. The software process manager uses data from TMT to better understand the various software processes prescribed practices and to guide software process improvement concerns.

The Case-Study Team

The case-study examples have been created during a course called Studio in Software Engineering (INF 4315) given at École Polytechnique de Montreal to fourth year students during winter 2001.

The project was to be implemented within a 13-week semester by a team of 5 students. Each student was expected to spend 135 hrs on this project that sums up to 675 person-hours. The students had already completed a first course on software engineering and an advanced course on software engineering or on software engineering Process. All students were familiar with at least one programming language. Knowledge of JAVA was recommended for this project.

One of the projects presented was then selected as The case-study to be presented in the UPEDU. Then, all artifacts have been revised, updated and controlled by the UPEDU team but the direct information remains intact.

The case-study presented in the UPEDU is the results of many efforts by the following people and collaborators:

The Students Team:

• Guillaume Boudreau
• Jacqueline Escalante
• Christian Paré
• Christian Robidoux
• Martin Trudeau

• Michaela Dulipovici
• Christian Robidoux
• Pierre-N. Robillard

• Christian Robidoux
• Pierre-N. Robillard

• Éric Germain
• Martin Robillard

How can I access the case-study examples? 

First, all case-study examples are in the Portable Document Format (.PDF). PDF files require the Adobe Reader Software, downloadable at the following link: Download Adobe Reader and is available on almost any platform.

Within the Artifact's description page

Most of the artifacts presented in the UPEDU were used in the TMT project. Thus, with every concerned Artifact Description page, there is a section titled Templates, Case-Study, Report... For example, this section might look like this:

Word Template	Case Study	Report

There, you find the related template (in Word format), case-study example and report template to the artifact. The RED icon is used for all case-studies. Clicking on that link will open a a new browser window containing the chosen example. All artifacts description pages are found under the Artifact Sets.

Within the available "Software Development Templates" page

This page is directly available in the UPEDU Navigation Frame. Or you can use the following link: Software Development Templates.

The page offers an overview of all available artifacts templates, case-study examples and reports ordered by Disciplines. The same pattern is used. (See above).