Procedures Exercise

For this exercise you are to break up into your project groups and design a procedure for one of the following (you will be assigned by the instructor based on group number):

1. Determination of whether or not a stranger you have just encountered is dangerous
2. Whether or not a particular course is interesting before you sign up
3. The best present to buy your boyfriend or girlfriend
4. The best order to open your birthday presents in at a birthday party with your friends and relatives
5. Splitting the bill when going out with friends for a meal
6. Finding a very small object you have dropped in the great outdoors
7. What to watch when you have 100-channel TV service
8. Determining how to seat people at a dinner party
9. Selecting a car to buy or lease
10. (Generalization of 9) Selecting any good to buy or lease

To begin, appoint a group leader and someone to document your output.  You will have 20 minutes for this exercise. After that time, each group leader will read the documented procedure to the whole class and we will discuss the procedure.

As you go through this exercise, pay attention to the following to guide you:

1. What information do you have to have and when do you have to have it? 
2. How do you acquire that information?  What determines how you acquire it?
3. What determines the steps in the procedure?  What knowledge is "embedded" in the procedure?
4. How would you test the procedure?  Is testing important?  Is it possible?
5. What are the apparent weaknesses in the procedure?  What could go wrong?
6. How easy or difficult is the procedure to follow?
7. What skills or attitudes or knowledge would anyone following this procedure have to have (i.e., what assumptions have you made about that person?)

Your goal is to create a reasonable procedure and to learn about procedure-writing as well as what software is and does.

Click here for a supporting presentation.