CSC480 Final Project

Overview: Complete a project that uses the skills you have learned in your undergraduate studies. The project should involve and extend the skills you hope to use in your career and will be a meaningful addition to your resume. The project needs to have a potential user and that user has to be involved in the design and in the user acceptance or judging, to tell you whether you have met their needs. While I will give some possible choices, you are welcome to propose your own project. The project will likely include some hardware or software that you need to learn from scratch during the project. Throughout the project, you will give written and oral updates, as though you were keeping your company informed of your project's progression towards completion.

The project documentation and code needs to be managed inside git repositories. Deliverables still need to be submitted to moodle by one team member though as I will not look into repositories for grading. Late work will have the grade reduced 10% per day.

Each project must meet the following qualities: (Teams are preferred, but individual projects can be proposed. )

• Have a real or potential user for the team to consult OR have a potential researcher audience. (If the product is meant to be marketed, a person willing to act as a prospective buyer would be the user, and if the project is aimed at a research conference, a person willing to act as a competition judge or publisher would be fine. )
• Read and change a file or database, or have a significant project substitution for this requirement
• Contain a substantial creation component for each team member.

Deliverables: The delivery points of the project will be emphasized as project control is very important to successful completion of long term projects. Those intermediate deliveries, such as project proposal, design documentation and test plans will weigh heavily in the assessment. If these deliverables do not fit your project type, you can ask me during the project proposal phase for different deliverables. I would need to agree to that in writing.

• Documents with no presentation associated:
  • Weekly: progress reports, first as a report, then as a gantt chart and finally as burn down charts
    
  • Project proposal with references
  • Annotated reference material summary

   

• Oral presentations accompany these deliverables:
  • Requirements Analysis document with rough gantt chart
  • Technical Design document with burndown chart broken down by individual responsibilities
  • First sprint cycle result - working release with Code and System Test plan review
  • Final project delivery of code with user manual, installation manual, analysis of planned vs actual hours on each task, document for future development listing backlog stories and tasks skipped in your release.

 

• Essays by each individual to frame the project experience:
  • Personal Goal Setting (what you hope to learn, personal strengths and weaknesses, connections to prior experience you hope to use, and goals you set).
  • Critical self-reflection done by each individual (what was learned, personal strengths and weaknesses, connections to prior experience and goals).