Course Projects

The purpose of the course project is to provide the students with the knowledge of software engineering methodology and the skills to apply it. The particular project is not the goal in itself; rather, it serves as a vehicle to apply your knowledge and to develop the skills.

Projects also introduce students to teamwork, which is unavoidable for large-scale software development. Teamwork has positive and negative aspects, and a familiarizing yourself with both helps you get ready for your future workplace. There are many challenges to good teamwork: time coordination; building on each other’s strengths and compensating for weaknesses; reconciling different working styles, preferences, and levels of motivation; etc. A key challenge is to make possible group efforts that discern contributions of each individual. This is a challenge in the course, where each students needs to be assigned a grade, as well as in your future workplace where your raise and promotion will depend on your perceived contributions.

This project consists of two iterations of a software product. The first iteration is exploratory and represents the first attempt at developing the proposed software product. The deliverables for the first iteration are reports #1 and #2 and demo #1. After these, the instructor/TA will provide feedback and the students should reconsider and possibly revise the project goals before moving on to the second iteration. Keep in mind that it is perfectly acceptable to modify your objective in the middle of the semester, once you learn more about the project and have better understanding of what you can accomplish within the semester timeframe. (Of course, you cannot switch to a completely different project in the middle of the semester.) This is why we have two (2) iterations, so that in the second iteration you can perform the necessary adjustments, based on what you learned in the first iteration. The deliverables for the second iteration are report #3 and demo #2.

Each team consists of 4 to 7 students working on the same project. Teamwork is required since team work is an integral part of large-scale software development. Larger teams should in principle be able to develop more sophisticated products. However, larger teams are also more difficult to coordinate and manage. It is more difficult to split the work in larger teams and ensure that every team member plays a meaningful and important role. Also see the grading policy which is affected by team size.

You should form a team by the specified date and notify by email the TA and the instructor about the following:

1. Team member names and email addresses
2. Your project web site URL (one web site per team)
3. Project proposal (see below)

All team members must take part in all project activities and none of the activities should be done exclusively by one student. Each team member or a pair must be responsible for all aspects of development required for the features they own (see “product ownership”), although it is acceptable to seek help from colleagues who are more knowledgeable about particular technical work (e.g., database integration, user interface design, etc.).

Project management deals with organizational matters that are needed for effective teamwork. Team members may elect one “team leader” who will take a lead in project coordination activities, or may decide to share coordination responsibilities. Project management includes the following:

• Organizing group meetings and keeping track of deadlines
• Managing shared resources (such as website, database, software repository, etc.)
• Integrating individual contributions in a coherent manner, and resolving ambiguities and conflicting information, including
  • collating different sections into a project report representing the entire team
  • proofreading the collated report to ensure consistent layout, font styles, section numbering, and language style
  • integrating different parts of the program into one software system
  • running integration tests and ensuring that the whole system works as intended
  • fixing software bugs that result from incompatibilities between software modules contributed by different team members
• Anything else that affects everyone in the team

You will soon realize that teamwork is difficult. Here are some suggestions (none of this is required!) about teamwork:

• Choose the team leader to serve as a focal point. Discuss individual skills and strengths (algorithm design, coding, report writing, etc.)
• Set the meeting agenda and time limits. Once the task responsibilities are known, in the beginning of the meeting have each student report about the progress on their task since the last meeting. If you are working on a project report, everyone should hand out drafts of their section or show slides of their diagrams or screen shots. Students are encouraged to confer frequently and work together on solving the problem
• Decide how will the team communicate, e.g., email, Twitter, Facebook, blog, instant messenger, ... As you make progress on your task, send drafts to others and ask for comments/suggestions. Do not wait until you have everything polished and finalized, but make them aware that this is a draft and tell them when to expect the next version
• Make every effort to ensure that all team members feel comfortable about each others’ contributions; be open about grievances. It is a good idea to be collegial and professional in your communications and avoid conflicts. However, you want to be open about any issues, because your final grade depends on it
• If in the days before a project deadline you are prevented (travel, illness, ...) from attending the team meetings, immediately notify all your team members and try to contribute to the best of your abilities
• If for whatever reason your contribution falls short of that of other team members, you should do extra work in the subsequent deliverable(s). This does not mean that you will ask your teammates to do less work so that you can compensate your previous shortfall. No. Rather, you should let them do their work as they usually would, but you should do extra work that will make your deliverable brilliant
• Plan for disaster scenarios: often team members depend on each other’s individual contributions. Set firm internal deadlines (well ahead of the actual deadline) for contributing individual parts, so that if a team member fails to deliver, the others will have time to take over and complete the missing part
• General policy: If in doubt, communicate! Redundancy is OK. Every time you send an email related to the project, copy the email to all team members. Do not assume that they are not interested in it or they know what you are talking about. Acknowledge any electronic communication specifically targeted to you

Team meetings should be structured to involve:

• Report on the progress since the last meeting
• Discussion of tasks that need to be done—come up with specific action items
• A period of time to assign responsibilities, draft the parts each person is responsible for, and ask questions to be sure you all are on the correct path

Tools to help organize the teamwork:

• Doodle—a tool for time management and meeting scheduling.
• GroupMe—a group messaging service that lets you stay in touch with groups of people via mobile phones.
• Five free Microsoft Project alternatives—project planning and tracking tools.

Saying that “nobody asked me to do this or that,” or, “I did everything that I was asked to do” is an unacceptable excuse. Each team member should be proactive and not wait passively to be assigned responsibilities. Do not ask others what should be done; rather, take initiative and suggest what should be done to make your project successful. Take every opportunity to redistribute and/or rotate the responsibilities, make your personal suggestions be heard! Many times defining the problem and determining what needs to be done is more difficult than actually doing it. Hence, problem defining and task assignment must be contributed to by all team members, rather than by the team leader alone.

The following free online e-book contains useful advice on how to work on student software engineering projects:
Tips to Succeed in Software Engineering Student Projects
Author: Damith C. Rajapakse, National University of Singapore
Publication Date: 27 June 2008.

First, keep in mind that having a team leader is optional. You will soon realize that there are many things that need to be coordinated and having a single central point-of-contact may be helpful. You should elect the team leader only if you believe this would facilitate your group work. Alternatively, you can appoint individuals as needed to coordinate meetings, deadlines, and track project progress, and rotate these roles among the team members.

The role of a team leader should not be misunderstood. The team leader may take lead in “project management” (i.e., providing organizational and logistical support, such as organizing team meetings and keepingtrack of work progress). The team leader is not expected to set the objectives, partition the tasks, and devise solution strategies. These responsibilities must be shared equitably among all team members.

If you choose so, it is a good idea to select the team leader based on his or her leadership, organizational, and social skills, rather than their technical skills and knowledge. Past experience has shown that people with poor organizational/social skills turn out to be poor leaders and their teams end up being dysfunctional, regardless of their technical knowledge.

The leader is not accountable for “failing to lead” and cannot be blamed for the lack of communication skills or general lack of success of the team’s project. For example, the leader has no such responsibilities as “knowing what needs to be done,” assigning work loads (fairly or otherwise), or distributing the responsibilities. This must be agreed upon by consensus. Most importantly, each team member must be proactive, rather than waiting to be assigned the duties by the team leader or anybody else.
Remember, all team members are equally responsible for all aspects of the project.

There are neither benefits nor responsibilities for the team leader. The team leader will not receive any rewards (e.g., higher grade) for serving in this capacity. You will notice that a certain number of grade points for each deliverable is allocated for “project management.” However, these points will not be automatically allocated to the team leader. All teams are required to submit a breakdown of contributions. The grade points will be assigned based on this breakdown. See here for more details on the grading policy.

If you notice that your team does not function well or the team and this could negatively impact your project performance (and your final grade), you should make every effort to discuss this with other team members. If the “problematic” team members (including the team leader) refuse to cooperate, you should discuss your concerns with the instructor, the sooner the better.
Complaints about poor team functioning expressed at the end of semester will be ignored.

TechRepublic: Download this project status report template, created by project management guru Tom Mochal, to effectively communicate project status to stakeholders and keep everyone on the same page: Project status report template by Tom Mochal; July 27, 2005.

Project Management Methodologies, by Jason Charvat, published by Wiley, NJ, 2003. (A book review by R. Max Wideman)

Computerworld: Team-building with tofu and grapefruit—Paul Glen says that when putting together a team, skills are one thing, but it also helps to evaluate people’s personalities in terms of how ...

Many students find team work difficult due to different personal interests and working habits. Therefore, each student should keep track of his or her contributions to the project. The exact breakdown of individual contributions must be provided for every project deliverable, so that individual grades can be fairly assigned.

Here are some comments provided in past student surveys for this course:
♠   “It turns out that some groups have forced one student to do most of the work because they are not very knowledgeable with coding, or for other reasons. This is unfair, and students that want to work alone should be allowed to.”

♠   “I didn’t like the group project experience cause kids that do not know anything and do not the work to be carried on the other kids that are actually doing the work. Having to show a Responsibility Matrix in the reports is unfortunately unfair. Half the time, I had to skew and scale the results of other teammates in order to make it look like they contributed equally; meanwhile I had to spend hours of my own time writing over 9/10ths of each report and over 80% of the code.”

First, course survey is not the place to provide such information. This information should be given in your contributions breakdown. Second, unfortunately this is how real world works. In your future workplace, you cannot expect to be nice to all your co-workers and say that everyone has contributed equally, but then expect to receive a raise or promotion that you “really deserve.” You are not being genuine by outwardly promoting equality and secretly hoping for inequality (so that you get a better grade). The best approach is to be honest and report the contributions accurately. If you wish to help your colleagues, help them learn the course material better instead of doing their work for them.

The breakdown of individual contributions should be submitted:

• In case of written reports, as the second page of the report   OR
• In case of project demos, by email to the instructor and the TA immediately after the project deliverable. Either of these options is acceptable:
  1. One team member emails a single contributions breakdown for their team (this is preferable, but please copy your colleagues on this email), or
  2. Each student emails individually an itemized list of their own contributions only.

Each student should provide an itemized list of his or her own contributions to the components of the particular deliverable, such as:
  . requirements specification (use cases and non-functional requirements),
  . software design (whole system or list the specific modules),
  . coding (whole system or list the specific modules),
  . debugging (whole system or list the specific modules),
  . report preparation (whole report or list the specific sections/diagrams),
  . Other: any other relevant contribution.
If several students contributed to a particular component, quantify, as a percentage, each student’s contribution to this component. Also provide a short description of your own contribution.

Team members who are not listed in the joint breakdown or do not email their contribution list will be considered as not contributed to the deliverable in question and will be assigned zero credit for this deliverable.

A potential problem has been observed in the past years. These projects are sufficiently complex that it is impossible for a single student to do everything. Good teamwork requires division of labor and building on each other’s strengths. Although on real projects the developers may split the work along their specialties, because this is an academic course, it is critical that all team members are engaged in all aspects of the project. Remember: the key purpose of these projects is for students to learn the class material through hands-on experience. Ideally, all team members should learn design, coding and testing the software (implementation for the demo) and communicate their work through(report writing).

Please keep in mind that you must inform us accurately of who did what if you expect us to assign the grades fairly.
There are seven project deliverables, so we need seven (7) contribution breakdowns from you.

Each team must submit a written proposal for their project. See here for more on Project Proposals.

Software class project ideas and example past projects are available here.

It does not really matter if the project was done before or it is being done by another team as long as you will not copy their designs and/or the code. Every problem can be solved in different ways. If you will come up with an original design and implement your own code, it is perfectly fine that you develop a product somebody else did earlier or is doing now.

NOTE: Unfortunately, the department is unable to provide resources for special project needs. Try to select the project and implementation technology that is generally available, since the logistics of project development and demonstration are entirely your responsibility.
See the next section about the resources.

Check useful free software available online.

A Microsoft site DreamSpark.com gives software to students for free. For example, Microsoft Project 2013 (check also Five free Microsoft Project alternatives), Microsoft Visio 2013, Microsoft Office 2007, Microsoft Lync 2013, and Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 are all completely free.

You may find useful this intro to Eclipse, an IDE for Java, C++, C, etc. programming  ◤  
CVS, open source version control   ◥   ANT, a Java build tool   ◣   JUnit, a unit testing environment   which is accessible in Eclipse   ◢   JCover, a test coverage tool for Java.
NOTE: You should also check the resources available in D-110, Engineering Building D-Wing.

Bitbucket  (Wikipedia article) allows you to host, manage, and share Git (Wikipedia article) and Mercurial (Wikipedia article) repositories in the cloud. Free, unlimited private repositories for up to 5 developers give teams the flexibility to grow and code without restrictions.

Example websites for free file hosting (you will need this for your electronic project archive):

• GitHub, Inc.
• Dropbox
• MediaFire
• Secure Systems Box

Reading additional materials will likely improve the quality of your project. Additional online readings material is available here.

• Omondo EclipseUML http://www.omondo.com/ (Academic License available for free)
  works with Eclipse http://www.eclipse.org/
  Note: This tool is also installed in EIT Lab (D-110)
• StarUML http://staruml.sourceforge.net/en/
  see also StarUML @ Wikipedia
  Open-source UML modeling toolsupports most of the diagram types specified in UML 2.0
• UMLet http://www.umlet.com/
  Open-source UML tool; runs stand-alone or as an Eclipse plug-in on Windows, OS X, and Linux
• Visual Paradigm for UML (Community Edition)
  http://www.visual-paradigm.com/product/vpuml/editions/community.jsp
  The Community Edition is free for non-commercial use; It puts a “Community Edition” watermark on your diagrams; Runs on Windows XP/Vista/7, Linux, Mac OS X, etc.
• Netbeans UML Plug-in http://www.netbeans.org/features/uml/
  Does not support all UML diagram types, but supports forward and reverse engineering
• ArgoUML http://argouml.tigris.org/
  see also ArgoUML @ Wikipedia
  It used UML 1.4 notation last time I checked
• Gliffy - Online Diagram Software and Flowchart Software
  see more Diagramming software @ Wikipedia
• IBM Rational UML Developer Tools

You may search the Web for other similar tools. Note that some tools lack support for some kinds of diagrams and others support only UML 1.4 notation (current standard is UML 2.3).
Microsoft Visio and open-source Dia are diagramming tools with a library of UML shapes that may also be used for drawing UML diagrams. (Rutgers students can download Visio at the University Software Portal.) Any tool that supports the UML symbology is acceptable.

Each team should maintain a single web site per team, listing the team members and contact information. The purpose of this website is for the instructors to be able to track the project progress. All project material (progress reports, related web sites, etc.) should be posted on this web site. Important announcements should be posted as well.
Examples of free project or website hosting:

• Google Project Hosting
• Google Website Hosting
• Yola - a free website builder

The team should also maintain their blog (an online journal—a freeform mix of news items, commentaries, and whatever else comes to mind), describing the project-related activities. You can get a free blog hosting on many sites on the Web. The blog should be linked from the project’s website.

Blog at WordPress.com

A good book about blogging is
Rebecca Blood, The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog, Perseus Publishing, 2002. Online at: http://www.rebeccablood.net/handbook/

2009 project: Educational Networking Tool for College Students

Departmental Resources

6.   Report Format

7.   Project Demos

8.   Project Grading Policy

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• Course home page
• Course syllabus page

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Ivan Marsic
Wed Jan 4 19:52:45 EST 2012