GR1: Task Analysis

Due at 5:00pm, Friday, February 22nd, 2008, on the wiki.

In this group assignment, you will start the design of your term project by doing the following:

• User analysis. Identify the characteristics of your user population, as we discussed in lecture. If you have multiple user classes, identify each one.
• Task analysis. Determine the tasks of the problem you've chosen, analyze their characteristics, and answer the general questions about tasks we asked in lecture. Think about other questions you should ask that might be relevant to your particular domain. You should find and analyze at least 6 high-level tasks. If you can't find that many, then your problem may be too small to serve as a good project.
• Domain analysis. Determine the important entities and relationships of your problem domain, and show them in a diagram (a problem object model or entity-relationship diagram). Include multiplicities where important.

To gather information for the user and task analysis, you should talk with 3 representative users who face your problem (at least 1 from each user class, if you have multiple user classes). If possible, observe them dealing with the problem in their real work environment. When you write up your analysis, don't provide a narrative of these sessions. Instead, offer your conclusions, and justify them when you can by referring to observations. For example, "grocery shoppers may be distracted by children; one mother was repeatedly harrassed by her son to buy some candy." Also, don't identify the users you interviewed by name, unless you get their permission to do so.

Wiki

In this assignment, you should also create your group's page on the class wiki, and start to fill it with information about your project. You will continue to add to your wiki page over the course of the semester. Each assignment (like this one) will add more information to the wiki. By the end of the semester, your wiki page will constitute the final report for your project.

The class wiki is located here: http://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.831/wiki

Log in with your wiki account (which you should receive over email), edit the main page, and create a link to your project's page. Follow the format of the Example Project when you create your link to your project. The main page for your project should be located in Projects/ProjectName, where ProjectName is the name you chose for your project.

After you create a link to your project page, click through it to the (initially blank) page, and edit it to include the following parts. Look at the Example Project (or even better, look at the editing view for Example Project) for a model to follow.

• Group members. A list of your group members.
• Problem statement. A concise statement of the problem your project is trying to solve. This can be taken from your project proposal.
• GR1 Task Analysis. This section should contain the report for this assignment, with two subsections:
  • Users. Your user analysis from this assignment, describing your major user classes and their characteristics.
  • Tasks. Describe the 6 (or more) high-level tasks you have identified.  Every task should have a goal and subtasks. Some tasks may also need preconditions, exceptions, time constraints, and frequency of use.
  • Domain. Your domain model as a diagram. Include commentary about any entities or relations that aren't obvious.

Feel free to use the wiki for working documents and communication within your group, but be sure to prefix all your group's pages with Projects/ProjectName/, so that different groups don't step on each other. For example, you might put your task analysis in Projects/ProjectName/TaskAnalysis. Note that wikis have no concept of relative pathnames, so you can't simply link to TaskAnalysis from your main project page and assume the wiki will expand it to Projects/ProjectName/TaskAnalysis. You have to use the full page name in every link.

You can also put internal group information on your project's main page, but be sure to mark it as such, and keep it at the bottom of the page so that it doesn't clutter your primary report.

If you've never edited a wiki before, you may find this FAQ on basic wiki usage and Wikipedia editing guide helpful. Our wiki software is MediaWiki. You can ask questions on the 6831 mailing list, or send mail to 6831staff@mit.edu.

What to Hand In

The deliverable component for this assignment is your group's wiki page containing the results of your analysis. It must be complete by the deadline.