Assignment 3, set Fri 12th September

1.
   Post your "Summary of skills" to the discussion board created in Bb,
   which will provide a personal inventory that includes a list of favorite 
   technologies or engineering subjects that you are interested in pursuing.
   Also, list strengths and weaknesses that you bring to a project team.

2.
   Problem 2.4 from the book. This was going to be a choice between 2.3 and 2.4,
   but given the short time we had, I don't think 2.3 is appropriate now.

      Assume a customer comes to you with the following request: "Design an RS-232
      networked personal computer measurement system to transmit voltage measurements
      from a remote location to a central server". What are the assumptions of this
      statement? Develop a list of questions you would ask the customer to further
      clarify the problem statement.

   "What are the assumptions" seems unanswerable, but in this context it has a
   special meaning. When someone asks you to solve a problem, very often they have
   not really understood what the problem is, and they may be asking you to do
   something that will not actually help.

   The example given in the book will help to understand. The client request is
   "The traffic at the front of campus is too congested. Design a new traffic lane
   for northbound traffic exitting at the intersection at the front of the college".
   You do that, but there is no improvement. The problem is that the client had
   posed the wrong problem.
      What they really should have asked was "The traffic at the front of campus 
   is too congested. Make it better". They had assumed what the solution would be,
   and allowed it to become part of the problem statement.
      Needing an extra traffic lane was not really part of the problem at all,
   it was just an assumption. Problem statements should only state what the problem
   is, nothing else. Anything that hints at how to solve it is probably just an
   assumption, and could lead to big trouble.
      Try to work out what the real problem is.