This few days I was thinking what we should consider when choosing an idea for our group. The followings are what I have come up with so far. You might not agree with me. I simply wanted to let you know what I think so that we can discuss.

The bottom line is that we want to have a working and complete program at the end of the semester. If we choose an idea at random without considering how feasible it is, that will place too much risk on our final goal.

First we only have access to limited resources. So before we start the project, we need to make sure we have all the resources that are necessary to complete the project.

Second, we cannot afford looking for technical support from others all the time. It is not only time-consumming, but also painful. So we have to make sure that we can handle most of the technical difficulty by ourselves.

Third, generally if an idea is hard to test, it is hard to implement. Remember that we have to do a demo at the end of the semester. If we cannot show that our program work correctly, we cannot convince the instrutor that we have done a good job. This implies that we not only need to make sure the idea is testable, but also we have the necessory resources to test it.

Again, these are just my personal opinions. In fact, you might even come up with more realistic ones.

-- Anonymous, September 19, 2000