Recently, a representative of the registrar's office of a local college asked if my software company could develop an on-line student registration system for the college. The college has approximately 1,700 students, 150 faculty, 40 support staff personnel, and 20 departments. The campus includes 8 buildings, housing offices for the faculty and staff and approximately 40 classrooms. In a typical semester, the college offers about 220 courses (some courses are large and subdivided into sections). After many years of increasing enrollments, the registrar's office staff noticed a serious need for a good, on-line student registration system.

Of course, my company with its talented staff of analysts, designers, and programmers is capable of developing such a system. As the development of the product must be rushed, I have setup the following deadlines, listed in the Table 1 below.

Table 1: Project Deadlines

After a few informal meetings with the customer, I have concluded that additional functions might be added to the enrollment system later. Thus, the initial assessment of the requirements is as follows:

Initial requirements outlining the concept of the system:

The system must allow the college administrators to define and enter into the system a variety of data, including information on:

• faculty
• students (including transcripts of their past courses and results)
• departments
• courses (with prerequisites)
• sections offered in a given semester (including enrollment caps)
• roll lists (for each course section in a given semester)
• buildings and classrooms
• access authorization.

1. An administrator-user should be able to add, modify, delete, and search/list entries in each of the above categories. For example, it should be possible to add/delete courses/sections, list all of the students currently enrolled in all of the sections, etc.
2. A student-user must be allowed to list (but not modify or delete) available courses and sections, as well add his/her name to a roll list in a selected course section. The student should be able to delete his/her record by a specified cut-off date, but not later.
3. A faculty-user should be able to view enrollment in sections that the faculty is teaching.
4. The system should check the required prerequisites and flag students enrolled without the required credit for a selected course.
5. The system should allow multi-user access, protecting against an incorrect concurrent access. The system should maintain suitable authorization data and enforce access validation.
6. The system must have an easy to use graphical user interface (GUI) with several screens suitable for each type of the system's functionality. The system should be Web-enabled, i.e. accessible from a common Web browser, such as the Netscape Communicator and Microsoft Explorer.
7. The system should use a permanent data store (most likely a relational database) to keep all of the data.
8. The college administrators insist that the system must work on Sun Solaris 2.8 and be coded in either C++ or Java. Also, if a database system is to be used, it must be MySQL.