Course Project

The course project will provide you with hands-on software engineering experience, involving a team of typically 4-6 students. You will design and develop your product from the ground up in 9 weeks. The project is broken down into weekly milestones. Note that the milestone descriptions may be updated before they are officially assigned (see Calendar) to reflect current class material and discussions.

• 01 Project proposal
• 02 Requirements and plan
• 03 Architecture and design
• 04 Testing and continuous integration
• 05 Beta release
• 06 Gamma release
• 07 Peer project review
• 08 Final release
• 09 Individual retrospective

Each week you will submit deliverables required for each milestone, write reports and attend meetings -- just like in real software development projects. Mark your team calendar to:

• Hold a weekly team meeting every Tuesday during section;
• Submit a project milestone every Tuesday by 11:59pm;
• Submit a weekly project status report every Wednesday by 11:59pm; and
• Hold a weekly project meeting with your TA every Thursday during section.

GitHub

We require that you use a GitHub (https://github.com) repository for version control, issue tracking, and continuous integration. This means that you will use Git (https://git-scm.com/) for distributed version control:

• Git book
• Git tutorial
• Git quick reference (list of commands)
• Version control concepts and best practices
• How to create and review a GitHub pull request

We recommend that you submit repository documentation as markdown files to become proficient in that format. Here is a good summary of the markdown syntax: GitHub markdown.

You choose the toolset

You will choose the toolset – programming languages, libraries, frameworks – that you use to implement your product. Regardless of your choice, your project must follow professional standards and best practices, such as separation of concerns, modularity, and abstraction; and use of style checking and automatic formatting.

Your whole team should work together to survey, choose, understand, and use your tools – just like in industry. 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.

You may use AI tools to assist with the coding of your group project milestone deliverables and for any AI-assisted features of your group project milestone deliverables. However you may not use AI tools for any other parts of the milestone deliverables. If you use AI tools (1) your group members must all agree to the use; and (2) you must clearly disclose the use in the turned-in material. See the Syllabus for more information on allowable use of AI in this class.

Some students report that the opportunity to learn a new toolset was a particlarly rewarding part of CSE 403. Doing so may come with some extra work, however.

Your team is ultimately responsible for choosing and learning these tools. That said, the staff wants to help you, so if you are stuck, please ask us! Note that we don’t know every tool or framework that you might choose.

Revisions

Each week, you will build on your work so far. Your TA will give you feedback. If your project suffers the same defect two weeks in a row (for example, you did not adequately address the TA feedback), then you will lose points from both submissions. Please attend to the feedback and improve your project.

Weekly status reports

Weekly status reports help to plan and reflect on tasks, and keep the staff and yourselves informed about your progress.

1. Project status

Each weekly project status report must include the following sections, with each section written in bullet points:

• High level goal. Describe in one line the overarching goal of your next release, which may take multiple weeks to achieve. Example: Develop frontend to backend working software for the Beta Release, showcasing feature X. This serves to keep everyone aligned with the overall vision to which you're working.
• Original goals for the week. This section should be an exact copy of the last section from last week (i.e., goals from a week ago). It can be empty for the first week.
• Progress and issues. Report on progress and issues: what you did, what worked, what you learned, where you had trouble, and where you are blocked.
• Questions for the product owner. List any questions for your TA to be discussed in your Thursday project meeting.
• Goals for next week. Outline your plans and goals for the following week. Each bullet point should include a measurable task and a time estimate (no longer than a week). We recommend that you label these with the student(s) who is responsible for the item.

Each weekly status report must be committed to your project git repository inside a top-level directory called Status Reports. Each weekly report should be in its own file named projectname-YYYYMMDD, using the date of the report, and be committed each Wednesday by 11:59pm. We recommend using a markdown doc for your report, which is most popular with github, however you may use a filetype of your choice.

2. Individual status and peer reviews

As part of each project milestone assignment, each team member must individually submit a brief individual status, indicating what they did and how they would rate their own contribution to the milestone, and a peer-review, indicating how they would rate each of their teammembers' contribution. A form will be provided that must be completed by the milestone deadline. This method of continuous feedback replaces surveys used in prior quarters, and allows the staff to better assist and reward student engagement in a timely fashion.

Weekly team meetings

Your team will meet at least once a week to discuss progress and issues, and/or work together. We have reserved Tuesday sections for this purpose. In-person meetings have been found most effective to past 403 students, however you can also meet via Zoom or any other conferencing system if your team members agree. Successful teams often meet more than once per week and collaboratively write notes and define concrete action items.

Weekly project meetings

You will meet with your TA for 15 minutes during section on Thursday (or at another mutually agreed time). You may schedule additional meetings or use your TA's office hours.

The course staff serves as both customer/product owner and senior manager. When you have a meeting with your TA, you are allowed to ask the TA to serve any of these roles, or even to switch roles during the meeting. As customer/product owner, the TA can help you to determine what a reasonable set of requirements are, and whether your documents and prototypes are compelling. As senior manager, the TA can help you to resolve conflicts or give suggestions about designs, teamwork, and tools.

It is a bad idea to try to hide information from your customer/product owner. If things are going poorly or you are having trouble, be upfront. You may get good suggestions, and the customer/product owner won't feel blindsided if you are unable to resolve the problems on your own. It is a doubly bad idea to try to hide problems or conflicts from your senior manager. Instead, use your senior manager as a resource to help solve those issues.