Briefly summarize The Gaming Room client and their software requirements. Who was the client? What type of software did they want you to design?: The Gaming Room is a software developer with a existing game application they are looking to expand to multiple platforms. The specific software they were looking for me to design was the port of that game Draw It or Lose It to a web-based application similar to the 80's show Win, Lose or Draw.
What did you do particularly well in developing this documentation?: My greatest strength in developing this documentation was outlining the design of the application itself and how that would relate to server requirements.
What about the process of working through a design document did you find helpful when developing the code?: I found the UML diagram to be of particular use when developing the code for the various interelated modules.
If you could choose one part of your work on these documents to revise, what would you pick? How would you improve it? I would further elaborate on storage management. Evaluate not just which storage managemant was standard to my recommended OS but outline it's advantages.
How did you interpret the user’s needs and implement them into your software design? Why is it so important to consider the user’s needs when designing? The user's needs should be considered alongside those of the client(The Gaming Room). Since this was an online multiplayer game which required streaming images the user devices I considered that the images would need to be loaded to the user's device before it was displayed lest it display at different rates for different users or not display at all. Without this consideration in design the user experience would be harmed and consequently the satisfaction of our client. If the user isn't happy with the experience facilitated by my design than my client won't be happy either.
How did you approach designing software? What techniques or strategies would you use in the future to analyze and design a similar software application? In this case I approached from the standpoint of porting software rather than designing it from scratch. I aimed specifically for adapting what already existed and what changes could be made in order to make the application portable without harming the user experience. This was quite different from my approach to designing an application from scratch. In the future working on a similar application I would focus even more on the existing design and evaluating how out implementation could be closer to the existing application, so that work done on the original can be more easily passed to the port and vice versa.