Part 13 - Maintenance and development
In this part of developing a solution to a problem, you need to:
a) Discuss the maintainability of the solution.
b) Discuss potential further development of the solution.
Things to consider doing:
a) Put a heading, Maintainability of the solution.
b) You need to discuss how the system will be maintained in the future.
You could start by saying in a sentence what maintenance is, the purpose of it. Don't write an essay on the different kinds of maintenance, however, just that fact that changes may need to be made in the future by people other than the original designers and for a variety of reasons.
You could start by saying that you have created (or would create) a complete, up-to-date and organised set of design and testing documents so that any person who has to make modifications in the future will be able to quickly get to grips with the overall structure as well as the structure of the detailed parts. This is simply a matter of collecting together all of your design documents, putting them in an order and adding an index page and a title page. You teacher should guide you on whether you should actually create this technical document.
You should include a description of any routine maintenance that should be done, what needs to be done, why it needs to be done and how often.
c) Put a heading, Further development.
d) What is it that your system cannot do now, that if it could, would add something to the system? Are there features that don't exist yet, that if they did exist would make a user's life easier, or make the product more fun to use, or would improve the speed that the system runs at. These are potential areas for development. Examples might include:
Developing a system of contextual HELP, so that a user could e.g. press the F1 key and the system would cleverly know what screen he was on or where the cursor was pointing, and then pop up with help for that place.
Perhaps the development of some music or sounds would make that interactive adventure game a lot more engaging for younger students.
The inclusion of graphics for a text-based adventure game might be worth exploring.
Being able to play against another person across the Interent would broaden its appeal.
e) Whenever you make a suggestion for potential further development, you need to justify why this might be a good idea and possibly what (broadly speaking) would be involved in implementing it.