cs205: engineering software?
(none)
20 September 2010
[PDF version for printing]

Project

Project Teams

Sam Brunjes, Patrick Harrison, Kramer Sharp
Grahame Burke, Richard Hsu, Michael Lew, Mike Liu
Emily Lam, Rachel Phillips

Project Deliverables

The project has several deliverables spread over the remainder of the semester, leading to presentations and demos on the last day of class. Details on some of the deliverables are below (more details on the first three deliverables are included in this document below).

Collaboration Policy (read carefully)

For this project you will work in assigned teams. If you have preferences about who you work (or don't) work with, send them to me before 11am on Friday, October 27. Teams should be at least two students, and no more than five.

You should divide work among your group members in an efficient and fair way. It is not necessary for everyone in the group to work together on all parts of the assignment, but every student should contribute equally to the work.

At the end of the project, each member of a team will be expected to submit a teammate assessment form, rating all of the team members' individual efforts and contributions. In most cases, all team members will receive the same grade. Team members may receive different grades if it seems clear that they did not contribute equally to the project.

Project Consultants

Instead of regularly scheduled lab hours, teams will also be assigned one of the assistant coaches as a "consultant". You should view your consultant as a highly paid expert (you needn't actually pay your consultant, of course, but giving them Bodo's or Krispy Kreme's is encouraged) who can help a limited amount with your project. You shouldn't expect your consultant to implement part of your project, but you should use them as a resource to help with your design, and to help with tricky parts of the implementation.

Purpose

Project Ideas

Your project can be anything you want as long as it is small enough for you to complete by the end of the semester, and complex enough that your successful implementation will demonstrate your understanding and ability to apply key concepts from cs205 including procedural abstraction, specification, data abstraction, inheritance, modular design, and systematic testing. You may implement your project using any languages and tools you want.

Ideally, your team will develop and idea for your project that will be (1) something that all teammates agree is an interesting project to work on, and (2) lead to a software system that you and others will find useful enough to want to keep using (and developing) after the class is over.

Some of you might consider developing a Google Gadget or a web application so your project may be more readily used by others, but it is also fine to develop a stand-alone Java application or a Java applet.

Using CVS

Since your project will involve several files, and your team will need to ensure that multiple team members do not simultaneously edit ths same files, we recommend using CVS to manage your project files. This will allow your team to store all your project files in a shared repository, and team members can check out and edit the files you want to modify. CVS will check there are no conflicts when files are updated. See the CVS guide for information on CVS.

Project Idea Description

On Wednesday, November 1, bring to class a short description of your project idea. It should describe what you plan to build from a user's viewpoint — what will your program do, and why would someone want to use it? You should also have some preliminary thoughts on how you will build it and what the main challenges will be.

Project Design Document

On Friday, November 10, each team should turn in a project design document. It should contain:
  1. A description of your project: what it will do and why it is useful, fun, or interesting.
  2. A high-level description of your design, including a module dependency diagram showing the most important modules.
  3. A description of your implementation and testing strategy including:
    1. how you will divide the work amongst your team
    2. how you will order the work to support incremental development
    3. how you will do unit testing and integration testing
    4. a list of milestones and a schedule for achieving them, leading to a completed project on December 4
  4. A list of questions