Project concept and scope

Justin and I met with Mark Szota on Wednesday this week to discuss the school's requirements for this project. To run the discussion we walked through the current process for making a loan, step by step. Mark explained where the problems were, and Justin and I made some suggestions for additional improvements.

I think that we gained a good understanding of the booking process that Mark would like to see implemented in the new system. We didn't move the discussion onto the more technical details, because we can talk about that next week. This week is about defining the project scope and requirements, and it was important that we focused on that to make sure we weren't getting ourselves into a project that wasn't right for us.

We asked Mark to send us some documentation on the current system. That included:

• Form that students fill in when they come to collect the equipment
• Database schema for equipment list
  
• Screen-shot of the FIT Call Logging System
• Photocopy of a page of the diary they use to record bookings
  

Over the next week we will have a look at this documentation and then meet with Mark again next week to determine what entities and attributes will be required in the new database. Justin will do some research into existing loan software. I will do some research into integrating a website with a barcode scanner, and write our project concept document.