Tablet PC Capstone, Winter 2007

Grading Guidelines

The premise for the course is that a software company has been formed to create consumer and educational software for the Tablet PC platform. The company aims to develop a series of prototypes to evaluate the feasibility of a number of project ideas. These prototypes are to be presented at a company meeting in mid-March 2007. The project ideas have been set by management, and developers will be assigned to project teams based on individual preferences and relevant constraints.

In addition to deciding which software projects to pursue further, management also needs to conduct performance reviews of all project participants. These will be individual reviews (but influenced strongly by team performance), done on a 0-4 scale.

The goal of each project is to produce a compelling Tablet PC application. Hence, the quality of the application and the degree to which it demonstrates the novelty and advantages of the Tablet PC platform will be very important in the project evaluation. Beyond that, there are many other aspects of projects that could be considered in the evaluation.

To allow teams to concentrate on those aspects of development that are important to the team members (e.g., to match their own professional development goals), management has decided to give each team the flexibility to specify (with some constraints) the criteria that they would like to be evaluated on.

Implementation
By 5pm on Friday, January 19 (the end of week 3), each team must submit - by email to the course staff - a breakdown of the weights they would like to place on each of the criteria listed in the table below. The weights assigned to all items must add up to exactly 100%. Items A, and B have initial weights (which cannot be reduced) totaling 50%, so there are 50% remaining to be assigned. The constraint is that at most 4 items from categories C-N may be assigned non-zero weights. Note: It is not necessary to assign all remaining percentage points to items in the C-N range; additional weight may be placed on one or more of the items A or B.

 WeightEvaluation Criteria
A40%Prototype
B10%Meeting deadlines and presentations at checkpoints
C Code Quality
D Design Methodology
E Project Architecture
F Testing Methodology and Test Execution
G Engineering Quality
H User Interface
I Release Quality
J Development Process
K User and Technical Documentation
L Technological Innovation
M Business Case for the Application
N Integration with Other Projects

Weights can differ between teams, but within each team the same weights will be applied to the evaluation of all team members. Hence, teams must agree internally on their preferred set of weights. If for some reason a team cannot agree and announce their decision by the stated deadline, the default weights to be applied will be A: 85% and B: 15%.