The Nurse-Scheduling Problem is an application we (a team of three programmers) had to complete for the Software Design course at the Pennsylvania State University. The goal was to create a system that could assign nurses to different shifts and requirements over a long period of time (several weeks) and deal with last-minute nurse changes.

Our final version was feature complete and taught us several major topics we only would of been able to learn thanks to getting all of the code complete and usable. The big lesson I learned: hire a designer for building the graphical-user-interface. It’s ironic but true: programmers have no idea how to lay out a GUI.

Don’t forget to check out our online StatSVN browser! it shows everyone’s efforts as well as details commit behaviors, changes over time, and some other pretty neat statistics.