Congratulations! Your pitch has been accepted by the venture capitalists, and you have attracted a talented engineering team to implement it.
Now you will expand your initial pitch into a more complete proposal. It involves many of the same aspects you (should have) touched upon earlier, but at a greater level of detail. You should also include both functional and non-functional requirements.
Work with your newly-assigned project team to establish a solid definition of your project from which to base a design and implementation. You will write a document that describes the goals of your project, its functional and non-functional requirements, and the processes your team will follow to implement it. This is the first iteration of a living document, and you’ll be asked to update it during the development cycle.
Create a repository for your project on GitHub. Determine if you want to make your repo public or private. Make all team members contributors, give all staff members edit access.
The top-level README should briefly describe the idea and goals of your project and explain the layout of the repository. It should link to your living document (which might be stored in the repository, or might be stored elsewhere).
See the Class project page for the content of the weekly status report. There is a team section of the report (typically written collaboratively) and an individual section of the report (typically written by each team member). Make each week’s report its own markdown file in a ‘Status reports’ folder in your repo, so that you can easily refer to past reports and track status. Tip: include the date of the report in the filename. Create a template for use each week. Your first completed status report is due 1/29/25.
Managing issues or tasks or bugs is a very common feature of project management tools like GitHub. We highly recommend you use it for team coordination. Consider creating a github "Project" alongside your repo to leverage their taskboard support. Project tasks can be simultaneously registered as issues.
Next week’s milestone will have you finalize your system’s architecture and design, but start exploring, prototyping, and setting up resources now. For example, if your project requires setting up a web or SQL server, get started on this task and add relevant instructions and information to your Git repository.
Review and follow the Git conflict resolution tutorial. When merge conflicts come up later in the quarter, you will be happy that you did.
Complete the tasks and include the link to your repository in your project living document (described below).
Create a shared living document. (We recommend a Google doc, MS Word doc, or Markdown doc in a shared repository.) The majority of your technical writing will go in to this document, and when a milestone is due you will make a snapshot (PDF) of this document and upload to Canvas.
Produce the first version of your living document with the following sections.
Provide the name, the brand, for your product. Your marketing team will want this on all your artifacts.
Use your project proposal as a starting point. Revise it based on feedback you received so far and the input of your whole team. It is very typical that your project plan at this point will have evolved from the project pitch last week. Additionally, add the following to this section:
The major features should constitute a minimal viable product (MVP).
Each team member must come up with and describe at least one use case of your product, following this template:
Use cases should capture the unique features of your product. Do not focus on features common to products, such as logging into a service, or downloading a result file.
Identify which student was the original creator of each use case(s). Team members should review each others use cases for accuracy and quality.
Describe at least three non-functional requirements of your product, e.g., related to scalability, usability, security and privacy, etc.
In addition to the requirements stated above, the course staff imposes the following requirements on your product:
Make sure that these requirements, if applicable to your product, are specialized to your project and included in your document—do not copy and paste the above requirements verbatim. You may leave this as a separate section or fold its items into the other requirements sections.
Provide a concise summary of the project team and project artifacts. Specifically:
Describe your quarter-long development process.
Export a PDF snapshot of your document named [project name]_m2.pdf and submit it to Canvas.
What programming languages, data sources, project trackers, and other tools will you use? What, if any, software components will you attempt to use “off the shelf” versus implementing them from scratch? Explain why you chose these tools and languages, as well as why they are suitable for your project.
It is OK to establish some of the answers during the requirements engineering stage and others during the design stage. It is also OK of some of these change as you continue working on the project.
A role describes the part of the project (or a set of tasks) a team member is responsible for. You can refine these roles as you continue to work on your project and you are free to change them as you go forward. It is important, however, to justify your current decisions.
Here are two examples for defining roles:
A typical web application project could have roles of: 2-3 backend engineers, 1-2 frontend engineers, and 1-2 engineers in charge of UI design (probably in addition to being frontend or backend engineers).
A data analysis project could have roles of: 1-2 people responsible for data collection and storage, 1-2 people responsible for data analysis and visualization, and 1-2 people responsible for infrastructure and automation.
You may also want to consider if someone’s role includes running a daily scrum or driving schedule updates.
Your group will collectively own its own work. If you think you may want to commercialize your project, you may want to consult early with a legal source. A resource on campus is Comotion. Most often, the main value of the CSE 403 project is to flesh out and test ideas, rather than to produce code that will live until commercialization.
Be aware of software licenses on open source (or other) software that you may want to leverage in your project. Understanding the ownership of intellectual property is important, for your class use as well as should you want to commercialize your project in the future. The 403 course staff is here to help you understand this space.
Plausibility, thoughtfulness, and level of detail will largely determine the score for this assignment. For example, generic or incomplete use cases often lead to deductions. You should choose and clearly describe substantial use cases that are important to the core functionality of your product. You should also list a reasonable set of steps in the various scenarios that can occur in these use cases. Make sure to not omit important steps or details. Make sure that the state of the system at the end of any path through the use case matches what the use case claimed is the final state.
Your documents must be clear and professional. This means they should be concisely written, with proper spelling and grammar, clear wording, and formatted with supporting structure to present your ideas clearly to the reader. Consider using tables or bulletted lists, and diagrams, to help organize the material in a format easier to read.
You are developing a living document, which means you should expect change requests and iterations.
No, grading focuses on completeness and proper writing (clarity and conciseness). As with all writing, technical or otherwise, you want to completely address each thing that needs to be addressed (in this case, requirements) clearly enough to be understandable. Do not pad your writeup. Express the information concisely and largely free of redundancy. (Use cross-references if necessary to avoid redundancy.)