CS 501 - Software Engineering
Feasibility Report

1. Project Outline

2. Scope

Required

• Pre-generate PDFs for bottom elements of legal code tree
• Pre-generate PDFs for larger divisions
• Modify existing XSLT script to incorporate PDF functionality in existing website

Desired
PDF generation of US legal code for either:

• on-the-fly PDF generation
• an extensible caching-queuing framework
• Shopping cart payment system and charging scheme for PDFs

Optional

• Database to support queuing and to track user statistics

3. Project Relations

Another team is working at LII on improving XML format of US code but does not directly affect our project.

4. Benefits

• Convenience of legal code in a PDF format available to public as supposed to website format
• Ability to provide an organized format for legal code in PDF for printing purposes
• Shopping cart payment system for LII

II. Software Development Plan

1. Constraints

The project is funded by Red Hat, therefore the client expressed a preference to rely solely on open-source software. Given the number of visitors to the website (approx. 9 million per week), the system must be able to handle the large volume. Experience-wise, the project team must learn new programming languages and environments.

2. Obstacles and Risk

i. Scalability
At this moment we are not sure whether the currently deployed shopping cart system can handle a large number of code sections which we will need to handle. Also, it is not clear how many users will use this PDF service. Given the number of visitors to the website, the load of the system can be huge.

ii. Lack of Experience
The developers' need to learn several systems and technologies is apparent in several areas. The production system is running on Linux, but none of the team members has good Linux background. The project needs to use various XML-related technologies and CVS fairly extensively, but most of the team members need to learn those technologies and CVS. In addition, none of the team members has experience working with the shopping cart system and the payment system currently deployed. Regarding legacy systems, the existing system that produces HTML from US code has to be changed, therefore the team must spend some resources to become knowledgeable about it.

iii. Integration with existing systems
The new system might need to coordinate with the currently deployed shopping cart system. However, at this moment we are not sure if this system provides such a coordination mechanism.

iv. US Legal Code Complexities
The code contains many irregularities in structure and data organization. Also, the DTD does not capture the precise semantics of the code.

3. Deliverables

• Feasibility Report
• Requirements Analysis
• Prototype
• System and Program Design
• Modified website
• PDF Conversion Engine

4. Project Process

Following feasibility and requirements analysis, we plan to produce an initial prototype of the system to show to the client to confirm developer thoughts on the project. After the prototype, we will move on to systems and program design and coding phases. Unfortunately, due to the nature of the legal data, there is not comprehensive test plan. At the end, we will conduct documentation and debugging as well as acceptance testing.

5. Resources

Software:

• XSLT Engine
• PDG Shopping cart
• XML
• Verisign Pay Flow
• XSL/FO Processor (PDF Generation)
• Apache server
• CVS
• Linux

Hardware:

• 1 server (lula.law.cornell.edu) used for project development and as a server for the concurrent version control system (CVS).

Facilities and Tools

• Regular meetings Mondays 5-7 in Upson Hall or the Law School
• Yahoo groups: cs501 (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cs501/) egroup for message board and limited file sharing capabilities
• CVS Repository on lula.law.cornell.edu will be used for development