CS 471 Fall 2020  >  Assignment 2

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CS 471 Fall 2020
Assignment 2

Assignment 2 is due at 5 pm Friday, September 11. It is worth 100 points.

Procedures

This assignment is to be done individually.

Turn in your answer to the exercise below on the UA Blackboard Learn site, under Assignment 2 for this class.

• Your answer should consist of your white paper, in PDF form.
• Your homework submission may not be examined immediately. If you have questions, e-mail me.

Exercise (100 pts): White Paper Draft

Purpose

In this exercise you will write a white paper of the kind a working professional might be asked to write.

Instructions

You are an employee of a small software development company that is considering the development of a web store for a client. While your company has expertise in web applications, it has never created a software system that needed to process credit card payments. Your boss needs the following information.

• For a web store, what are the options to process credit card payments? What are the pros and cons of each one? (Focus on the top 3–5 most realistic options.)
• What is PCI Compliance?
• For an Alaska-based business with approximately $100,000 in sales per year, which payment method should the store use? (State any assumptions you make and justify your recommendation.)
• If the business grows to $1,000,000 in yearly sales, does this change your answer? (Again, state assumptions and justify your recommendation.)

Write a white paper aimed at your boss that answers the above questions Turn in your white paper as a single document in PDF format.

This is a draft. I will return it to you with comments, and you will revise and turn in a final version in a later assignment.

Notes

Write as if you really are an employee as described above. For example, you do not want to give your boss a white paper that says, “CS 471 Assignment 2” on it.

While this is a draft, your work should not look unfinished; nor should it be marked as a draft. Do the best you can on this draft version, then make the final version even better.

These are your goals:

• Be concise, yet comprehensive.
• Write with a limited vocabulary. Use technical terms that may be unfamiliar as necessary, but define them first.
• Make your document organized, scannable, and visually stimulating.
• Compare/contrast multiple options in an easy-to-read format.
• You are not selling anything; you are presenting accurate information.

Document your sources—both sources of information and sources of images. In the body of your white paper, it should be clear what you have personally written based on information from another source and what you are including verbatim.

Please review both the Writing as a Software Professional slides [Google Slides] and the Sample White Paper [PDF].