ASP.NET 3.5 Enterprise Application Development with Visual Studio® 2008: Problem - Design - Solution

1.1. Problem

Sue is the vice president of human resources and is currently using a combination of Excel and Word templates to manage employee vacation and personal time requests. It has come to her attention that many requests are not accounted for and are difficult to track down. She has received approval to build a system for the entire organization that will replace her current templates with an enterprise-wide application. As the project's sponsor, Sue has designated Mary as the main point of contact for the IT department in order to gather requirements. The following is an initial conversation that might occur when starting on this project, although you could find similarities with almost any project.

Mary: "My manager put me on this project but I really don't know anything about computers or building systems. They tried to build something a few years ago but it never went anywhere and the developer was fired. Let me explain a little bit about what we do. We have a Word template on the Z drive that everyone must fill out for vacation or holidays requests. When we sent our Excel spreadsheet that keeps track of everyone's vacation balance to the managers last December, a lot of discrepancies came up. We were missing days that some managers forgot to send to us or requests had been cancelled and we were never notified. We need a database to replace the Word template."

Me: "So you want to automate the process of requesting vacation. I've used that template, so I know a little ...