Proposal Review: Mechanapp

I'm here reviewing a proposal put forth by James Vickers, a fantastic fellow student in the cs department. You can find the proposal here.

Review of Proposal: “Mechanapp”

Proposal author: James Vickers
Reviewer: Ronald Shaw (wraith55@gmail.com)

Part 1: Proposal restatement

The proposal is to create an application that can assist in the diagnosis of a car problem using probabilistic diagnosis based on other entries into the system. This will help for both professional and amateur car owners and enthusiasts to fix any problems on their own, while paying as little as possible.

Part 2: Reviewer reaction

The idea is a good one. Car repair is a mystery to a large majority of the populace and even the good ones are shooting in the dark a lot of the time. I kind of like to think of it as a “WebMD” for cars, a simple diagnosis tool so that you can get quick and easy advice.

Part 3: Quantitative scores

Format: 4

The format was good, though some information seemed to be repeated. Nothing too drastic though, and easy to look through and know the scope of each section.

Writing: 5

Very easy to read, and explains the project very well. Solid writing.

Goals and tasks: 4

The target audience was well defined, and the product was well laid out from a front end perspective. I think more analysis needs to go on on what needs to be done behind the scenes though, on the technical side.

Scope: 3

I think more thought needs to go into the platform and the technical side of the project (even if you're not sure on the platform, pick one and if your team decides to change it once you form, that's fine), but the scope of the marketing and attracting customers is good.

Plausibility: 5

Everything talked about could easily be done and is being done for different applications already.

Novelty: 4

Similar to other diagnostic tools out there, but none that I know of for cars. Seems like a very solid and novel idea.

Stakeholder identification: 2

The stakeholders are not identified, though the target audience is outlined very well.

Support and impact: 4

This could easily make an impact on anyone who works on cars, so good job there. But how will the application be supported once the product is done, and the twelve weeks are up?

Evidence: 4

You did a good job of talking about other tools out there for mechanics, but you also could have talked about other diagnostic tools out there.

Challenges and risks: 3

Technical challenges weren't addressed. A lot of marketing and viability challenges were though, such as having customers enter previous solutions into the database, which was good, since that will be a major problem upon starting up.