Logistics and Coordination
September 14, 2005
This document summarizes the way the Capstone is organized,
the roles of the team members, sponsor and instructor, and the key logistics, coordination,
reporting, metrics and resources involved in supporting the Capstone
experience.
Time and
Location of Sessions and Meetings
Logistics and Coordination: 1st Term (CS
487)
Logistics and Coordination: 2nd Term (CS
488)
Progress Review Meetings and Reporting
Class sessions and team meetings will be held weekly and as required throughout both terms:
Weekly Sessions: Monday evenings from 6:40-9:20 in FAB 150
Internal Team, Sponsor, and Instructor Meetings: as required.
This course offering will use PSU’s WebCT online course management system to support the course. WebCT will be used to capture the skills inventory of all students in the course, coordinate each team’s activities (meetings, issues, …), and to submit your project documents.
Initially, our
Capstone class will have a structure similar to that of most other classes. The
scheduled weekly class session will consist of lecture and class interaction.
The aim of these lectures is to reinforce your knowledge of commonly accepted
software engineering and project management practices.
By the second half
of the first term, you will have formed into teams and your teams will become
increasingly self-reliant, responsible for accomplishing near-term goals of
understanding the sponsor’s requirements and producing a feasible project
plan. By the end of the first term your
team should have jelled into a highly cooperative group; you should be dealing
with the Sponsor like a true customer; and you should be seeking the buy-in of
the Capstone Instructor like you would of a senior program manager overseeing
the various ongoing projects of the company.
By the second term
of the Capstone, the course will have morphed into something unlike any other
experience you have had at the university. A major goal of the Capstone is to
accustom you to a corporate team environment, where responsibility for getting
things done belongs to the team and its members. Your modus-operandi will shift from relying
on the Sponsor and Instructor for inputs and guidance, to one where you become
totally responsible for providing progress visibility and constructive ou
The Capstone
Instructor can help with customer interactions, vendor interactions, computers,
equipment, other resources, e
The Sponsor is the ”customer” and is expected to provide the requirements and general scope for the project. The project team is expected to elicit the requirements from the sponsor, ensure they are well understood, and review the feasibility and estimate the scope of the requirements. A professional approach should be followed when interacting with the Sponsor, whether it be my email or face-to-face. The entire team should attend meetings with the Sponsor, especially during the initial elicitation phase. As the requirements become largely well understood, the most efficient strategy will be to elect a team representative to work with the customer to deal with issues that may arise. If the project turns out to be infeasible, or the scope is simply too large to complete in the time allocated during the second term, the team should negotiate a down scoping and prioritization of the requirements to fit the time available to complete the project.
During the first two
weeks of the 1st term (CS 487), the overall process to be followed for the
Capstone is discussed (kicked-off), students are asked to summarize their
technical and people management skills, and team building activities are
conducted to get students familiar with each other and to understand what is
involved in building an effective and jelled team. The Capstone Instructor groups students into
teams such that each team will consist of members with complementary skills and
interests.
Project sponsors
visit the class and present their vision for a software-based project they
would like to see implemented typically during weeks 3 and 4 of the first
term. In effect, the sponsors are
”potential customers” soliciting requests for proposals (RFPs) from the
Capstone class.
Teams are asked to
indicate their preferences from among the sponsor proposals by the 5th week of
the term (teams indicate their 1st, 2nd and sometimes 3rd choices). The Capstone Instructor assigns projects to
each team, based partly on the teams' skill sets and partly on their level of
interest in each proposed project. The Instructor will provide guidelines on
project management, eliciting requirements from the customer, managing project
scope, coordinating activities and developing a project plan.
After the project
assignment, each team will schedule weekly status meetings with the Instructor.
These will be formal meetings with each team member responsible for reporting
on their particular activities and the status of their individual deliverables
during the preceding week. Attendance at these meetings will be mandatory
unless specifically excused. Failure to attend, or chronic inactivity as
determined from the weekly status report will reflect on a team member's
Participation grade.
Teams will also be
expected to meet monthly with their project sponsor to ensure that they
continue to align with the sponsor's vision and have not deviated from the
sponsor's expectations. Sponsors should be viewed first as a customer and only
secondly as a resource. While customers may be willing to help, ultimately it's
the team's product.
Teams will present
and submit their project implementation plans for the 2nd term activities
during week 10 of the 1st term. This
plan should be consistent with the project plan template provided for the
course and should include a schedule of milestones and meetings to be held with
the Instructor and the Sponsor during the 2nd term. Should corrections / changes need to be made
to the submitted plan, it will due in week 11.
During the second
term, progress meetings with the Instructor and Sponsor will be held as
required. During the 1st session of the
2nd term (CS 488), the Instructor will specifically review the schedules for
each team with the aim of making adjustments to maximize project visibility and
the likelihood of success. Meeting times
and locations will be agreed to during this session.
Teams will review their progress and issues with the Instructor during these weeks. Adjustments to scope will be made as required. Each team is responsible for coordinating their activities and issues with the sponsor.
A major project
review will be held with each team during this week. .
The final
implementation of the system should be baselined and delivered to the sponsor /
customer by week 9.
Dry-runs and final
presentations and demos will be held during week 10. Final submissions of presentation and other
support documents will be due in Week 11.
A post-mortem discussion (lessons learned and Q/A session) is to be
scheduled as part of the final presentations.
Note final presentation attendees will include representatives of the
sponsors, other CS faculty, and other invited guests from the public.
As mentioned in the course document on evaluation and grading, the project will be assessed on several factors including whether it succeeded or failed, the quality of the plans and processes that were carried out to develop the software or system, teamwork, participation and technical quality of the documentation (engineering notebook and presentation materials).
All students must schedule their activities such that they are always available to meet during this reserved time slot. This class time slot will be used both for class sessions and individual team meetings. After teams are established and projects get assigned to them, meeting time-slots will be arranged for each team to meet separately with the Instructor. To the extent possible, these team meetings will be held in slots within the regular class period. However, depending on class size and number of teams, meetings will also need to be arranged outside of the regular weekly class session. Students must therefore be prepared to meet outside the regular class time slot with the Instructor and sponsors as required.
Students are responsible for planning their activities and scheduling mutually acceptable meeting times to coordinate their joint team efforts, progress reviews with the Instructor, and requirements elicitation meetings with the Sponsor (”customer”).
During the course we
will therefore meet both in ”plenary sessions” as a class and separate team
sessions. Typically, meetings with the
Instructor in given week will be either with the entire class together in the
regular class slot, or separate team meetings, some of which may be scheduled
during the regular weekly time slot.
Each weekly team
with the Instructor (a.k.a. senior manager) should be a 30-45 minute review
meeting highlighting:
a. the progress achieved
b. problems / issues needing to be resolved
c. planned next steps towards completion
This will provide
some visibility into team performance, dynamics, and effort invested by
individual team members. In addition, the status meetings will ensure that each
team makes steady, consistent progress towards completing the project.
Meetings with the
customer should be driven by an outline of the requirements, issues encountered
with the requirements, and requirements yet to be completed.
During the process of conducting your project, teams will be asked to provide certain measurements relating to both team member activities (e.g., hours of effort) as well as the artifacts with which the team is working (e.g., lines of code or number of pages). During the lectures on project management and estimation, metrics collection instruments will be distributed to the teams.
Teams will be
assigned a pod of computers in the Computer Science Capstone Lab. These
machines are currently running Win2K, but teams are welcome to install other
operating systems such as Linux on their pods as well. Teams are responsible
for system maintenance and backups. System support is limited to erasing the
disk and reinstalling Win2K.
Other resources such
as utilities, development environments, tools, e
In some cases,
sponsors may provide tools and software components. In these cases it is the team’s
responsibility that appropriate licenses and other permissions are in
place.
Installation of
pirated, unlicensed or otherwise illegal software is forbidden, and will be
treated as an act of academic dishonesty.