| COURSE OBJECTIVES |
| The objective of this course is for students to experience the successful definition, design, development, test and deployment of a database application in a real-world team project setting. The course will employ a hands-on approach where students are expected to learn by actually developing a database application. This course will allow students to: |
- understand and apply the concepts of a database application development life cycle;
- understand the challenges and techniques of documenting database application requirements;
- apply principles and techniques of conceptual, logical and physical database design for a real-world application;
- develop skills in project management;
- work as a team member (according to biblical principles) in the development of a real-world database application, including the development of a project notebook that demonstrates the successful application of the above skills;
- develop technical writing, presentation and teamwork skills;
- learn and demonstrate knowledge of database development tools
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| THE PROJECT |
| A semester-long team project is the focus of this course. Students were informed in CSC 332 of the need to identify projects for this course. The purpose of the team project is for students to apply the principles and concepts from CSC 332 in a real-world, team project setting. Students are required to form teams and to propose, define, design, develop, test and deploy a database application. The team projects must be done for actual organizations – non-profits, church and para-church organizations, departments at Messiah College or companies in the area. |
| Project Selection Guidelines |
| The following guidelines are offered for team project selection: |
- Students will be given a project prospectus document to share with potential sponsor organizations.
- Students are especially encouraged to reach out into the community and identify projects that could be a real ministry to community-minded organizations and para-church organizations with a Christ-centered mission.
- Projects should be new database applications and preferably not modifications to existing database applications.
- Key people in the organization that are knowledgeable about the database application must be available to your team, including a manager and key end users. Such people are critical to effective database application development. They must also be able to provide timely guidance and review of project deliverables for each milestone.
- The proposed database application must have good potential for applying database requirements, analysis and design methods as discussed in CSC 332. Indications of good database application potential include new database application needs driven by some business process problems or the automation of existing manual processes that are inefficient or ineffective.
- The project must be completed in three months with two to four students working about ¼ of their time on the project.
- Projects must also be complex and large enough to benefit from a database application development life cycle approach (requirements, analysis, design, etc.). Generally speaking, the system should involve a significant business process (customer management, sales process management, inventory control, order processing, etc.) encompassing at least 5 to 10 database tables and associated relationships. The level of project complexity will be taken into consideration as part of the grading.
- It is desirable for the database application to be integrated with the Web in some meaningful way. This could be either with a full Web-enabled database application or by providing Web access to select portions of the application. This will be discussed more in class.
- Teams are required to use either industry-standard database technology (e.g., MS Access 2000, MS SQL Server, Oracle, etc.) or open source database technology (MySQL, Postgress, PHP, Perl, etc.).
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