COSC 499: Capstone Software Engineering Project

For Winter 2024 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: TBA 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. 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). An important goal is to learn a well-functioning team process, which we will spend a lot of time working on.
• In Term 2, things will be more free-flowing. We will focus more on advanced features and testing to make sure your prototype works (even when we aren't looking ;-). If you don't have your team process nailed down by the first term, the second term will be a struggle. Remember that software engineering isn't just about getting features completed, it's also about how the project is built, are the features well-tested, is the code maintainable, is the code base clean, etc. You can get a lot of features completed and still not do well in this course.
• Think of your project as a pitch to your client's request for proposal ("RFP" in industry terms). Your client will want a good idea, a slick user experience, a clean implementation, and an easy-to-maintain code base. The end-of-year client panel will showcase the winner of each project option.

How Each Week Works (Roughly)

Class attendance is mandatory. Treat this course like a job.

Much of what happens in this course mimicks real-world workplace expectations. The project will give you hands-on experience working in a team and building a relevant product for a client. All the technical skills and soft skills you gain (communication, time management, collaboration) will all be fundamental for your professional career development.

There are two sections this year, so the logistics are a bit complicated. We are trying to align the schedules from both sections together. One section has classes running on Mondays and Wednesdays, while the other has classes running on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Most holidays fall on a Monday, so we'll do the best we can to keep things consistent between the two classes.

• Two-Week Cycles:
  The class will operate using a two-week cycle where we expect properly merged pull requests in your repositories at the end of each cycle. Unmerged code is problematic for your team process and productivity, so please work hard on properly sizing your code features.
• Mondays/Tuesdays and Wednesdays/Thursdays:
  Mini lectures (where applicable), biweekly checkin's with teams, in rotation with deeper technical conversations. You are expected to work with your team outside of class.
• Biweekly Checkin's:
  The professor and/or TAs will request a progress updates and live demos 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 asked to provide more detailed progress updates in a given week. We will not announce which teams are selected in advance; our decisions will be 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 all your work by the same deadline each week, at the same time. This information helps us understand where everybody is at by the beginning of next cycle. Note that there are additional activities that take place in class on specific milestone due dates and "Peer Testing" session dates (highlighted in red in the tentative schedule below).