This section will describe and critique the software development method that was chosen for the project and which software and tools that were required to successfully complete the project.
The design methodology that has been adopted for use within the project is a mixture of throwaway prototyping and evolutionary prototyping; “A prototype is an initial version of a software system that is use to demonstrate concepts” (Sommerville, 2007) this will be used for the user interface elements and the incremental approach to software development for the main program. With the incremental approach “Customers do not have to wait until the entire system is delivered before they can gain value from it” (Sommerville, 2007). As the project involves some user interface design, the throwaway prototyping will be the simplest way to generate screen designs quickly and easily; Evolutionary prototyping will be used to get a feel for potential features that will need to be implemented in the final program. The final code will be written using the incremental approach due to the short time scale for the project, Throwaway prototyping was considered but will not be used for the final program as this task will involve a substantial number of lines of code and losing it for each prototype will be found to be too time consuming. The second choice of development model would be to use the waterfall method of software development; this was quickly discarded mainly as it would be a little too restrictive for the user interface design aspect of the project.
All work for this project has been conducted on a Macintosh computer, however software produced has been tested in windows and Linux environments using a Dell XPS m1730 portable desktop to gather test data for Windows GPU and CPU clients and Linux CPU clients.
The software required during the course of this work included various Folding@home clients that will be used to run my project against, a UML Case tool to aid in the design of classes and use cases and project management software was used to plan the project down to the last detail.
An Integrated development environment was used to write the main code for the project and a hex editor was required to aid in the deciphering of binary files produced by the client. The first draft of the report was written in the content generation tool Scrivener; this tool allows for the insertion of notes and Meta data to different sections of the report, which aided in the organisation of the project. The final draft of the report was edited and formatted using the popular word processor from Microsoft for its powerful formatting tools and Table of Contents generation tool. A referencing tool was also used throughout the project to organise references and quotes.
This chapter introduced the project as a whole and its close dependency on the Folding@home project. It looked at the Software development methods that were be used to produce the software in its three iterations, although the third iteration will be reliant on time.
In the next chapter we will be looking at how the project has been planned and organised.