Your task is to continue with the development of an online meeting scheduler system. This has been running for the last two years. Last year, the groups ported the J2EE 1.4 version of the prototype to Java EE 5. The customer has selected a prototype system from one of last year's two groups for continued development by your group.

Borth University requires a system that will allow its staff to manage meetings. Meeting venues are lecture theatres, and other meeting rooms, depending on what is required: e.g. a large conference or a small department meeting. Many of these venues are managed centrally by university timetabling staff. Other venues are managed by specific departments allowing members of the department to book those venues.

Such a system needs to deal with both short meetings and conferences spanning several days.

The system should also support the initiation of meeting participants to a potential meeting asking for potential participant date and time constraints: e.g dates they cannot attend. The goal here is for the system to ascertain the optimal date and venue for the meeting so that the majority of potential participants can attend. Active participants must also be asked about other special equipment requirements on meeting venue.

Integration with a participant calendar/diary desktop tool is important so that the participants can be kept up-to-date with the meetings they wish to participate in, their venues and their dates/times, and especially if this information changes dynamically. Separate, web access to functionality is also required since an end user is not always able to access her desktop/laptop calendar tool.

Detailed functional and non-functional requirements will be expressed using XP stories and acceptance tests. These will initially be tentative and will be refined during the course of the project.

There are two major non-functional requirements. First, XP, or agreed adaptations, must be used as the development methodology. Second, the programming language must be Java, using the J2SE and Java EE 5 platforms.