COSC 499: Capstone Software Engineering Project

For Winter 2023 Terms 1-2

• Download the course outline that covers course objectives, grading, and various course and university policies. We will review this in the first lecture but if you miss it or forget the information, you can always come back and reference this document.
• Office Hours: Tuesdays 2:00-3:00pm and by appointment.
• Important Dates: See the university calendar for important dates and deadlines.
• Available Projects: See the list of projects.

How Things Work Each Semester

This is a long course. Let's survive together!

• The purpose of term 1 is to get you working in your teams and making some initial progress in the project. Some of you will already have experience with the tools we use in this course, but many of you won't. So the focus of this semester is to get everyone up to speed and functioning well with each other in the team (so we can survive through the entire year together).
• In the second term, things will be more free-flowing. We can focus on more advanced techniques, such as code patterns, CICD, and dockerizing your project. Again, some of you are familiar with these concepts, and some of you may also have experience in these techniques already. For the most part, most of us just know the concepts and haven't really practiced them. We can also make time to cover specific topics that your project needs.
• If you have other suggestions, please let me know (in advance) so we can incorporate them as we go along (we will do our best given the limited time and resources).

How Each Week Works (Roughly)

• Tuesdays:
  Mini lecture (where applicable), weekly checkin's with teams after (you need to attend the class), You are expected to work with your team outside of class.
• Thursdays:
  Mini lecture (where applicable), but will mostly be weekly checkin's with teams (you need to attend class). You are expected to work with your team outside of class.
• Weekly Checkin's (rubric):
  The professor and/or TAs will request a progress update and live demo during class. If a situation arises and is deemed to be severe and necessary, the team involved will be asked to meet outside of class. Due to time and staff limitations, a subset of teams may be requested to complete the progress review. We will not announce which teams are sampled in a given week; we will make our decisions based on a random selection process in combination with how much help specific teams need. Please be patient and use the class time effectively to work with your teammates.
• Sunday 11:59pm:
  Submit your weekly checkpoints and all other work by the same weekday, at the same time. This information helps us understand where everybody is at by the beginning of next week. "Mini presentations" and "Peer testing" are the only ones due in class (highlighted in red in the tentative schedule below).