Assignment 3: The re-opening

Give yourself a new requirement, work out what it does to the approach you committed to, and grade your own Assignment 1 against what you now know

Due: 21 May 2027 · Weight: 40%

The brief#

Requirements change. Choose a new one for your own target, and find out what your committed approach costs you now.

You choose the requirement, and the choice is marked. A requirement that your approach absorbs without difficulty is not an interesting answer and will not give you much to write. One that invalidates everything and is obviously absurd is not interesting either. What is wanted is a requirement a real user could plausibly ask for next, which lands somewhere awkward.

Good candidates are the ones this course kept returning to: it now needs to drive native applications, or to draw, or to run several things at once, or to survive a reload, or to work for somebody who cannot install anything.

Work out honestly what survives. In this field the answer is usually “less than you would like”, because you did not build an application — you built an execution environment tuned to a target, and a change to the target is a change to the environment.

What you submit#

One document, doing three things.

The adjustment. The requirement, and what it does to your committed approach. What still works, what has to be rebuilt, and what you would now choose if you were starting again.

The audit. Re-read your Assignment 1 and mark it. Where were you wrong? Which reduction would you now reverse? Most importantly: at what point in the semester did the evidence that would have corrected you become available, and what would you have had to do to notice?

This is the largest single criterion in the assignment and the one students under-invest in. Being wrong is expected. Being wrong and able to say precisely when and why you became wrong is the skill the course is for.

The estimate. What the change would cost, in your own measurements rather than in adjectives.