CS222 Spring 2014 Section 1: Final Project Requirements

Introduction

Your final project will be your focus for the second half of the semester. You will be working with a team on your own project, developing it in three discrete iterations. The final project is designed to be the primary vehicle for your achievements and the central topic of your reflections.

Teams

You will form your own teams. It is recommended that you do this primarily around the times you are available and secondarily around shared interests.

Each team must register with the instructor by sending an email that provides all team members' names. Teams must register by the end of the day on February 7. They must address the required Project Design elements described below at time of registration.

Project Design

Every team must identify their target audience and a need for their project. This identification must be specific enough to allow you to test your project with representatives from the audience. For example, "students" is too broad as it includes an enormous variety of ages and cultures. "Non-traditional students at Ball State University" and "Chinese Computer Science majors in the 1+2+1 Program" are both more reasonable targets: you can identify individuals readily for focus group discussion or acceptance testing.

Once you know your target audience, you can identify a specific problem that they have. What need does your project fulfill?

Pitch

Each team will give a project pitch to the class. It is strongly recommended that you review the pitch requirements with the instructor prior to your pitch. The presentation may be at most eight minutes long. Slides are optional and handouts are encouraged. The pitch must satisfy the following requirements.

• Identify the target audience for the proposed project and the need that it addresses.
• Identify the key features of the proposed project. There should be about three to five features that define the core functionality.
• Give a schedule estimating which features will be completed for which milestone.
• Describe the technology you propose to use to complete this project. Note that Java and Eclipse are recommended but not required.
• If the project has a user-interface, provide a sketch or mock-up of it. If not, provide examples of the use case for your project, such as sample clients for a library or Web service.

Project pitches will be made on February 10 during our regular class meeting time.

Pitches will be evaluated according to the following rubric.

A team must repeat their pitch if they earn 0 or 1 point on any row or if total points is less than 12. Revised pitches will be scheduled for the next possible class meeting. Once again, it is strongly advised that you discuss your project pitch with the instructor prior to delivering it to the class; having to complete a second pitch will eat into precious design and development time.

Non-Functional Requirements

All projects must abide by the following non-functional requirements.

• Developed by a team of three or four students from the class.
• Follow established conventions for your language.
• Follow the principles of Clean Code. This includes both structural principles (such as OOP and SRP) as well as procedural principles (such as TDD). An exception will be made for strictly view-level code, which does not require TDD.
• Be completed in three iterations with executable releases (that is, potentially shippable products) delivered at the end of each iteration.
• Use Mercurial for version control, hosted on csmerc-2. If you choose not to make the repository public, be sure to add the instructor in the monitor or developer role.
• All project dependencies must be contained within the project itself or else specified in Maven.

Schedule of iterations

Stable executable releases are to be tagged in the repository at the end of each iteration according to the following schedule.

Milestone presentations will follow on the two class periods after the end of an iteration. Each milestone presentation may be no more than ten minutes long and must address the following.

• Demonstrate the executable release.
• Contrast the projected features against those complete during the iteration.
• Adjust feature schedule based on what you learned during the previous iteration. You may skip this step during the third milestone presentation.
• Describe critical components of the software architecture.
• Summarize the results of user testing.

At the end of each milestone, you will receive a formal evaluation that covers both your milestone presentation and the executable release itself. The evaluation will include the following elements.

• Clean Code: structural quality and evidence of good process
• Version control: reasonable record of commits, proper tagging
• Correctness: the release fulfills a need for the users, as evidenced by user testing
• Presentation: milestone presentation meets the requirements listed above