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Project 2: Project Investigation

This homework is worth 84 points.

It should be done as a team.

P2 is due on Gradescope on Monday, September 21, 2026 11:00am ET.

Learning Goals

  • Learn about your partner organization
  • Learn to interpret a project idea into a set of preliminary requirements
  • Identify ambiguities, possible errors, and missing information from the project idea that require interaction with the partner organization to resolve
  • Brainstorm multiple ideas for achieving the goals of the project idea

Project Context

You have chosen your team, your partner organization, and a particular project idea. Most ideas from clients are great first cuts at what they think they want. All ideas require refinement to turn into a concrete project that your team will take on for this class.

  • Do your due diligence. Learn as much as you can about your partner organization.
  • This will help you interpret the project idea they have offered and come up with a basic set of requirements for a good solution.
  • Discover the aspects of the project idea that leave you with unanswered questions, especially if there are contradictions, ambiguities, missing information, or outright mistakes.
  • Finally, you are a new team and are just getting to know one another. Discover the range of your capabilities and imagination by brainstorming 3 possible instantiations of the project idea. These should be as different from one another as possible, yet all should fit into the scope of a project doable by the end of the semester.

1. Partner Organization

Learn more about your partner organization.

Turn in answers to the following questions:

  1. Name
  2. Acronym
  3. Mission Statement
  4. Disabilities they address
  5. Stakeholder(s) they serve (e.g., people with a disability, parents of a person with a disability, doctors, service providers, etc.)
    1. For each stakeholder you list above, identify how that stakeholder is served by the organization.
  6. Founder Information
    1. Name
    2. Year Founded
    3. Founding Story: Why did they create this organization? What was their original motivation?
  7. Previous names of the organization and/or prior organizations they may have absorbed since their founding

2. Requirements

Identify the basic requirements for any solution to the project idea. For each category below, create a bulleted list for any and all unambiguous facts you understand about the project idea. If there's a fact that you are unsure of, try abstracting the concept until you can get to one your whole team buys into. For example, if you are unsure what programming language you should use for a web app (e.g., Javascript or Python), you could all agree that it has to be a "web browser client-based programming language."

  1. Technology Requirements
    • Imagine an alternate universe in which you could hire a software/hardware developer to build this project on your behalf. What technologies required to develop this project and make it run would you put in the job advertisement?
  2. Stakeholders
    • Who are all the users of this project? Who will maintain it?
  3. Deliverables
    • What specifically does the partner organization want you to give them at the end?
  4. Project Steps/Stages
    • How many steps or stages should this project be divided into? This does not need to be a linear progression; some steps may be done in parallel if they share no dependencies.

Turn in a single bulleted list with the top-level headings above. Fill out each if the sections with a nested list. Please explain your choices with full English sentences rather than single nouns and verbs.

3. Question Your Organization

One paragraph project ideas are full of ambiguities and missing information. Come up with a list of questions you want to ask your partner organization at your first meeting to resolve everything you are unsure of. The information you were given may have ambiguities, contradictions, missing information, or may be erroneous.

Turn in a list of questions for your partner organization that you can ask during your first meeting.

4. Brainstorming Solutions

Come up with three possible implementations/instantiations of the project idea that could satisfy the partner organization. You may brainstorm these as a team or individually. You can come up more ideas than you need and then filter down to the best ones. Your goal is to make each of these ideas as different from one another as possible, while still meeting the project requirements and the mission of the partner organization. Scope the implementations to the amount of work you believe your team can accomplish by the end of the semester. We expect you to work on this project about 7-8 hours per person per person. If the implementations are not enough work to keep your whole team busy, we will ask you to work with your partner organization to make them more complex/interesting. Trust me, your partner organization will have no problem imagining more ways for your team to support their cause.

For this assignment, an implementation of the project idea consists of four parts.

  1. Product Vision
    • Big idea of the implementation and its intended impact
  2. Value Proposition
    • What problem does this vision address? Why should it matter to the intended clients/users? What makes it special and distinguishes it from the competition?
  3. User Stories
    • What users will be able to do in this implementation. Just list the top 3 user stories.
  4. Storyboard
    • Quick graphical sketch of how the user experience unfolds

Turn in 3 implementations.

Each implementation need not be fleshed out fully; you're coming up with proposals for the partner organization and you have no idea what they'll like. They might just like individual components of all three implementations. In P4, you'll negotiate with your partner organization the specific project you will implement that combines the best of all three (or perhaps come up with a fourth if they don't like any of the initial ideas).

Submission

Turn in a single PDF with answers to each of the four parts of this assignment.

Only one team member needs to make the submission; that person can then add the rest of the teammates as group members in Gradescope to make it a group submission.