Dating Agency

Software	EITHER a database management system plus a programming language with good GUI building tools OR an object oriented programming language such as Smalltalk or Java
Covers	Requirements specification, object oriented design, interface design, artificial intelligence
Skills Required	Systems analysis and design, programming, preferably some interest in psychology or artificial intelligence
Challenge	Conceptual ?? Technical ?? Programming ??

Brief Description

Dating agencies need to keep records of clients including the information they provide about what they're like and what they're looking for, and evaluate how well different people are likely to suit each other, in order to propose matches. Your mission is to develop a computer support system for the operation of the dating agency, including its record keeping.

While building an interactive front end to a well-designed database should be reasonably straightforward, and result in a barely adequate project, there is quite a lot of scope for sophistication in analysing what sorts of personal information you should collect about individuals and how you compute the appropriateness of matches. So given a sufficiently powerful and flexible basic design, you should be able to develop a more sophisticated system incrementally. For instance, people don't just differ in the values of attributes such as age or interest in football, but also in how much different attributes matter to them. How can you accommodate this?

Another important challenge of the project is thinking through how the dating agency will operate, and analysing the requirements of both the managers and staff of the dating agency and the clients. You should also think carefully about the moral issues involved in your design decisions.

Variants

You might like to build a web-based system to support web-based or email-based interactions with the dating agency rather than paper-based interactions. But what are you going to do about security?

You don't necessarily need a standard relational database, though relational database design should of course be done properly. This would be a good opportunity to explore the power of object oriented databases; a non-dbms approach to object persistence is another way to go.

If you want to be unromantic, you could think about other areas of life and work where people need to find people or companies who have interests, skills or abilities that match their specific needs, and who might benefit from a 'dating agency' introduction service. One possibility is a job agency or temping agency system for matching job vacancies to potential applicants, or a system for a sandwich year placement office to match students to placements. Again there's plenty of scope for sophistication in thinking about what makes a good match, and computing assessments of matches.

Extensions

There are various kinds of survey information you could collate for management reports.

You might like to look into the psychology of sexual attraction and relationships, and think innovatively about how to gather personal information and desired characteristics from clients (aptitude tests and psychometric tests, anyone?).

Back to