This week was more meetings than coding. I learned firsthand what it means to design a relatively complex system from scratch. Every time we discussed features or implementation strategies, something new would arise that hadn’t been considered before. The database has already gone through several iterations but is starting to come together logically. The list of considerations, however, is constantly growing. For instance, we’ve now agreed to have a variety of user types – Student, Professor, Coordinator, Chair – in an attempt to split up the work required to initially set up the database as well as for ongoing maintenance. But this then makes the entire success of the system dependent on the consistent and accurate input of every user (all but Students, actually). Is it reasonable to expect that course coordinators will update the list of professors and the classes they respectively teach at the beginning of every semester? There’s also the issue of how much control any one user type has. A disgruntled employee with elevated system privileges has the ability to completely ruin usage for everyone below him or her. Will this be a valid concern for us? Some of these questions simply cannot be answered by our team alone; Fardad’s already had to call higher-ups to get answers to very specific questions regarding Seneca’s internal structure. We’ve accomplished a lot this week, but we undoubtedly have a lot more ahead of us. I finished the tentative sitemap in DIA as Visio was only set up today. Chad and I concluded that a calendar-based view for displaying meetings and lectures would be ideal for this system. I’ve done a bit of research and found a flexible jQuery calendar plugin we could use. Hopefully we can do some cool things with it!