The goal of the course project is to provide you with hands-on software engineering experience, involving a team of 6-8 students. You will design and develop your product from the ground up in 10 weeks. The project is broken down into several milestones, listed on this page and on the course calendar.
In addition to submitting artifacts required for each milestone, you will also be required to submit a weekly status report every Tuesday by 11pm (except for March 31 and April 7).
You have a great deal of latitude in choosing your own toolset. Your team is ultimately responsible for choosing and learning these tools. That said, the staff wants to help you as much as possible, so if you are stuck, please ask us! However, be aware that we don't know every tool that you might choose. Your whole team should work together to choose, understand, and use your tools—just like in the real world. You should be, or become, comfortable with reading documentation that is sometimes incomplete or confusing, and with installing and using new software. These are skills that will stand you in good stead, no matter where your career takes you.
Weekly status reports help to keep the executives, the customers, and yourselves informed about your progress. The team status update must fit on a single page, and it must specify the contributions of individual team members.
Each status update should have three sections. Each section is typically about the size of a paragraph, but it can be organized as bullet points or in some other clear way.
You may find it helpful to read the more detailed instructions for writing a research status report from which the CSE 403 guidelines have been adapted.
Your team status report will be submitted using the course dropbox.
If you need additional resources (a mobile phone, Amazon Web Services credit, software installed on attu or cubist, etc.), please tell the staff as soon as possible. We will do our best to accommodate such requests, but cannot make any guarantees.
It is required that your team project can be installed, by a staff member, on a fresh CSE virtual machine image (or on other readily available resources such as attu, cubist, or Amazon Web Services). If you have written a mobile device app, it must run both on an emulator and on some mobile device, but it does not have to run on arbitrary mobile devices.
You may use any programming language you like. However, your project must obey professional standards of modularity and abstraction. Some languages make this very difficult to guarantee, and we strongly recommend against them.
Here are tools you can use to draw UML diagrams.
The CSE lab machines have a full complement of development environments/tools, including most or all of the following.
If you use Microsoft Windows on your personal computer, Cygwin might be helpful in interoperating with software hosted on CSE Unix machines (such as version control repositories).