Week 5: Use-Cases
Goal
MISSING GOAL
Expected Results until this Week
We will discuss expected results during the class on this week. So please make sure to be prepared! More about penalty and bonus pointsExpected results not specified yet. You should continue working on previous assignments.
| Title | Duration |
|---|---|
| The Assignment Manager Saga | 15 minutes |
| From Subjective Notes to Objective Needs | 30 minutes |
| What Did We Miss? | 30 minutes |
| Fighting Ambiguity | 30 minutes |
1: The Assignment Manager Saga (15 minutes)
The Saga
The morning Professor Rubric entered the lecture hall, the room felt different. He did not greet them or check attendance; he walked straight to the front, his coat brushing against the desks, and placed a battered USB stick onto the table as though it were a sacred relic.
“Students,” he said, his voice calm but heavy with portent, “today we will attempt something greater than your scattered commits and half-finished reports. We will build the Assignment Manager—a system to tame your teams, track your submissions, and make grading fair. But beware: if your requirements are flawed, this creation will turn against you.”
The air grew tense. Some students leaned forward, eyes alight with curiosity, while others sank lower in their seats, wary of what was coming. Four of them, though, felt the weight of his words settle directly on their shoulders.
Iron UML, who saw the world as a network of circles and arrows, each problem solvable if only diagrammed correctly. Captain Glossary, who despised vagueness and ambiguity, carrying her dictionary of definitions like a shield. Black Scenaria, whose relentless “what ifs” could unravel the neatest of plans. And the Prototyper, who could conjure working illusions of software out of sticky notes, sleepless nights, and sheer imagination.
They became the team.
Their first attempt was bold and immediate. Iron UML charged to the whiteboard, sketching ovals in a flurry of marker strokes: Submit Assignment, Form Team, Allocate Points. The diagram spread like a constellation across the board, neat and comforting in its symmetry. For a moment, the room felt victorious already.
Then Rubric tilted his head. “And what happens when a student vanishes before grading? Or when two tutors grade the same work?”
The silence that followed was painful. The ovals looked less like answers and more like empty portals.
Black Scenaria broke the stillness. “Drawings won’t save us. We need to tell the stories of what actually happens.”
So they began. They imagined Alice forgetting to submit, the repo crashing minutes before a demo, a teammate disappearing without a word. They played out each scene, realizing with a sinking clarity how many gaps remained in their plan. But slowly, from these fragmented stories, larger patterns began to form: not just battles but campaigns, the use cases that lay beneath the scenarios.
Yet even their stories stumbled when words betrayed them. Arguments flared: one insisted “salary points” meant guaranteed grades, another said “price” was bonus features, and a third claimed MVP was simply the lowest grade possible. The noise grew until Captain Glossary rose, notebook in hand.
“Enough,” she declared. “From today forward, we speak with one tongue. Salary is fixed points. Price is value for features. MVP means the smallest deliverable. We write it, we sign it, we keep it.”
Reluctant hands signed her glossary, even Professor Rubric scrawling his initials. For the first time, the chaos of language bent to order.
The Prototyper struck next. On her laptop, a sleek interface shimmered into life: teams forming with a click, submissions bound to GitLab links, points distributed with elegant sliders. The room gasped. It was beautiful. It was almost real.
Then Iron UML, grinning, slid every point to his own name. “Look,” he said, “I win.”
Groans and laughter erupted, but beneath it came recognition: their system was fragile. They added constraints, caps on allocations, approval steps, immutable logs. Every loophole patched revealed a requirement they had not seen before.
Weeks passed, and Rubric returned, now wearing the strange aura of a man who carried invisible stones in his hand. “Consistency,” he demanded. “No redundancy. Completeness. Modifiability. Conformance.” Each word landed like a blow. The students inspected their work against his criteria, finding cracks they had missed. They patched and refined until their flows held firm under his scrutiny.
As their project grew, they saw two mountains rising before them: one called Requirements, the other Design. Whenever they climbed one, the other shifted. Each new requirement reshaped their design; each design choice forced them to sharpen the requirement. They realized now that the peaks were not rivals but twins, rising together, impossible to climb in isolation.
And then came the Deadline Monster. It stormed through the hallway with the fury of a calendar gone mad, bellowing “Three business days before demo at 08:00!” The ground trembled beneath its weight.
The heroes fought back with their creation. Teams formed with bus-factor warnings, submissions rejected invalid links, peer allocation bound by rules and logged forever. The tutor dashboard gleamed, separating salary from price with perfect clarity.
The Monster swung its colossal calendar. Captain Glossary lifted her notebook. “All terms defined. All flows complete.” The blow rebounded. The Monster shrank, howled, and dissolved back into the ether of schedules.
Exhausted, the team collapsed on beanbags, surrounded by empty pizza boxes and the faint glow of their victory. For a moment, they believed the worst was behind them.
But Professor Rubric returned, framed by the light of running pipelines. His voice was quiet, almost gentle. “You have captured the requirements for assignments, teams, and grading,” he said. Then a smile spread across his face—the kind that always meant trouble.
“Now,” he whispered, “capture the requirements for your requirements manager.”
Groans filled the room. Yet Captain Glossary was already on her feet, notebook raised. Iron UML gripped his markers. Black Scenaria muttered fresh what-ifs under her breath. The Prototyper opened a new blank canvas.
“Avengers,” Captain Glossary said, her voice steady despite the weariness in her eyes. They all felt it then, the weight of another battle looming, the certainty that the saga was not yet done. “Assemble.”
And the story would continue.