Judicial Interface for the 28^th Judicial District Bar Website

Brandon Alspaugh

November 2004 

Advisor: Joseph Brownsmith

Clients: Walt Turner & The 28^th Judicial District Bar

Description

This project was intended to assess and develop a functional user interface for the 28^th Judicial District Bar Website. The greater website is a multi-year project initially began by the CSCI 446 Systems Analysis and Design Project Class in Spring 2004. 

This project required a number of skills from across the CSCI discipline, from database construction and extensive UML design to module coding and consistent user feedback. Perhaps the most beneficial aspect of this project, from my own perspective, was the experience of working with and for real-world users who understood very little about computers or technology, but had clear and defined notions of the sort of system they wanted to implement. Working with these users has been invaluable, not only from a business communications standpoint, but also a critical thinking standpoint; translating their requirements into practical technology solutions.

Both the sheer scope of the Judicial District Bar Website and the complexity of my own portion ? which required a great deal of independent study and courthouse visits to gain a greater understanding of the legal world ? demonstrated the clear value of extensive prototyping and logical design. For this reason, a significant portion of the project was devoted entirely to the concept and design stage, which involved creating detailed Use Cases and Use Case Diagrams, as well as System Flow Diagrams and other documentation. The final documentation produced by this project, well in excess of one hundred pages, will hopefully prove valuable for future developers.

Also, because of the number of people involved with the project, consistent communication and re-evaluation has been required throughout the process. Keeping abreast of the parallel work of others involved in the project not only, at several points, prevented one or both of us from duplicating work, but also led to better and more fully-realized design than solitary development. As being a member of a large group or project is a situation a computer professional will no doubt find themselves at many points during their life, the experience of large-scale project development, and working with a number of people, was invaluable.

In the actual construction phase, I was aided tremendously by an object-oriented approach to development, which identified several key modules I needed to construct that would fulfill all of the functions the user required of the interface. This required extensive ASP, SQL, and DHTML coding. The end result is a functional prototype which fulfills all user requirements known thusfar for the Judicial Interface portion of the 28^th Judicial District Bar Website.