Midterm

There is just one question on the midterm, but it asks you to draw from both of the papers we read and discussed. (You can also draw from your project experience, but be sure to draw from the papers as well.)

The midterm is due at 5pm Wednesday, November 12. Turn it in by sending your answer as plain text in the body of an email message, using this link:
Turnin email

Your answer should be 500 words or less. (The question is 331 words, so the upper limit is about 1.5 times as long as the question.)

Here is the question:

Development project teams may be distributed between organizations for a variety of reasons. One of the reasons is to combine domain expertise from different organizations participating in a collaborative project. Here are two hypothetical* examples:

a) Nike and Apple are jointly developing "smart shoe" systems for runners. Sensors in the Nike shoes will interact with iPod music players designed and manufactured by Apple. The adaptor between the shoes and the music players will be jointly designed and implemented by a team composed of a shoe sensor design sub-team at Nike headquarters in Portland; a web interface team at Apple's headquarters in Sunnyvale; and a data acquisition sub-team based in Apple's Portland offices. Each sub-team includes experts in one part of the system.

b) Electrical Geodesics, Inc. is a small Eugene company that produces dense-array electroencephalograph (dEEG) devices for measuring brain activity. These dEEG devices can be used together with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) devices to obtain more complete data about brain functioning. Combining and visualizing the large data sets produced by these devices requires advanced image-processing algorithms running on parallel computers. A project team to build a prototype dEEG+fMRI combined visualization system is composed of a dEEG expert from EGI, an expert in neuroanatomy and an expert in fMRI imaging from the UO psychology department, a computer science professor, and three graduate students, one from psychology and two from computer science.

Pick either one of these examples for your answer. Suppose you have been asked to help organize and manage that example project. How will you apply lessons from the papers we read? Please draw at least some from both papers. Don't just repeat advice from those papers --- explain how you would apply it to the specific example you chose.

* Parts of these examples are pure imagination, but both are (as they say in the movies) "inspired by a true story". See:
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/may2006/tc20060523_569911.htm
http://www.egi.com/research-division-converging-neurotechnologies
I have no idea about the actual composition and location of the development teams.