As the project's subject is original and as such has not been covered in great depth before, a literature review in the traditional sense cannot be done successfully. To overcome this problem, various works that are linked to the different aspects of the subject have been collated together so that a sufficient pool of knowledge can be built upon in order to enable the project to be completed successfully.
The main book that will be referred to, in order to adopt an appropriate design methodology for use within the project is Sommerville's "Software Engineering" book. This contains almost everything that will be needed to know about picking a suitable software design approach and also contains information about the field of Software Engineering in general. It will serve as a base to structure this report in a logical way and also contains a lot of information about all major phases of the software development lifecycle and the different software development models that can be used. (Sommerville, 2007)
To enable the project to be completed on time good project management is essential, Maylor's Project Management book is an excellent resource of formal project management techniques that can be adopted during the course of the project. Software tools such as Microsoft Project and the open-source OpenProj will be useful tools to assist in creating "Work Breakdown Structures and Gantt charts" (Maylor, 2005) which are essential project management methods to aid in keeping on track of time within the project lifecycle. These resources were used in the "Planning" section of this report.
This project will have a substantial section on requirements collection and analysis. The requirements for the software will need to be collected in a controlled and measurable way. Kotonya's "Requirements Engineering" book will assist in choosing the right requirements elicitation technique for use within the project. (Kotonya and Sommerville, 1998) The Requirements Engineering book also had good examples of how to use the techniques described and case studies that may come in useful for referencing within this work.
The design phase of the project will be broken down into two sections, the first section will involve the design of the components that have been diagnosed as required in the requirements section of this report, and the second section will be all about the Design of the User Interface. The Unified Modelling Language (UML) will be used to notate the design of the project via methods such as "Class diagrams", "Use cases", "Component diagrams" and "Sequence diagrams" (Fowler, 2004). The Fowler book, UML Distilled will be useful at this stage as it explains how to use the notation correctly in a way that is easy to understand.
The second part of the Design section will be all about the design of the User interface, "Jef Raskin (March 9, 1943 — February 26, 2005) was an American human-computer interface expert best known for starting the Macintosh project for Apple in the late 1970s." (Swarthmore College Computer Society, 2010). As Macintosh computers are (arguably) known for their good user interfaces, his book, The Humane Interface (Raskin, 2000) will be a useful starting point for user interface research.
As the main program will be written in the Java programming language, this will enable to keep the program portable between Linux, Macintosh and Windows. Java Software Solutions (Lewis and Loftus, 2009) has many examples of good programming practices in Java, it will also serve as a go to book to look up classes in the standard Java libraries and give examples of how to use them.