Reference no: EM133218570

Scenario

Imagine you are in charge of a small 3-person development group who will be developing a KWIC (Key Word in Context) index generation tool for an online course. Specifically, your product should have the following features:

It's input will be a group of HTML files representing the online notes from one lecture.
The titles of each page in the group will be indexed.
The tool will be run once a week with a new lecture's worth of HTML pages. The tool should add the new index entries to the existing index.
The output of the indexing tool will be HTML that is ready to post on the web.
The execution platform will be a Windows 10 PC.
Although this list of features only gives an outline of the requirements for the product, it should give you enough of a feel for the intended use that you can make educated guesses for any questions you run into as you complete the assignment. Feel free to use your best judgement in such a situation.

TASK

The main task of your assignment is to evaluate the 4 KWIC Index architectures, and then select the one you believe is best for the scenario outlined above. Write up your results in a short paper (five pages). Be sure to include the following elements in your solution:

Project Summary: provide a brief description of the requirements for the system you are creating. You can start with the 5 bullets listed above, and extend that with any additional assumptions, features, or restrictions you think up yourself as you proceed through the assignment.

Evaluation Criteria: Devise a list of key design decisions (either a choice to support some kind of change, or a choice to commit to something unchangeable) that are relevant to the system at hand. Be specific; something like "support a change in function" is too general--"support a change from indexing page titles to indexing all words on the page" is better. Your goal is to provide a set of design decisions that is more comprehensive than the list Garlan and Shaw used in Figure 10 on p. 21, and that will provide an effective way to compare the architectures for this specific scenario.

Evaluate 4 Architectures: Evaluate each of the 4 architectures against your set of criteria, briefly discussing the strengths or weaknesses it has with respect to each design decision you have chosen.

Select the Best: Choose which of the 4 is best suited for use in this hypothetical situation. Justify your choice by drawing on the evaluation you have performed.

Conclusions: You may find that your final choice among these 4 candidate architectures still has some shortcomings. In wrapping up your paper, you can identify any weak points in the architecture you have selected that need to be addressed for the project to be a success.

You may also make suggestions about alternative architectures that were not considered, or about anything you might change or do differently in your selected architecture for solving the problem.