Due: See Assignment Schedule

These are a mix of Team and Individual assignments.

Expectations for Weekly Journals, Status Reports, and Demos

On the weeks that you do not have an assignment or Milestone to present, you will give status reports. Here are the expectations for the weekly status reports.

Issue Tracker (individual)

Each team member should have at least one issue in the team’s issue tracker they are responsible for. Each week, each team member should add at least one comment to this issue to document his or her work for the week. These comments should be comprehensive - do NOT simply write a couple of lines - make sure to provide enough detail so that other team members and your instructors and advisors can comprehend what you’ve accomplished. Each weekly entry should contain a list of the following:

• Links to issues that were created/opened by you
• Links to issues that were closed by you
• Links to each commit made by you

Please format your entry as a bulleted list.

You can create a link to a commit by pasting the first 8 (or so) hex digits of its hash code.

Journal entries (individual)

You will also each maintain a Weekly Journal as a shared Google doc on your team’s drive. Your journal entries should summarize your work for the week.

They are due by 9:00am (before class) on the day of your project presentations, and MUST address the following points:

• A self-assessment grade (0-5) on the work you accomplished over the past week that will be justified by the subsequent points
• Briefly what your TEAM accomplished in the past week
• In more detail, describe what YOU accomplished over the past week
• List the challenges you faced that impeded your progress, and explain how you dealt with them
• Discuss what you intend to accomplish for the next week
• Make sure to include links to your major commits for the week
• Include screen captures, links to external resources, and whatever information may be relevant to the research and work that you investigated/accomplished - throughout the project, your weekly journal will accumulate your research, your accomplishments, and the effort you have put forth

DO NOT wait until the last minute to update your weekly journal. You are to maintain this journal daily, as you perform work on the project. DO NOT rely on your memory to capture your weekly effort at the end of the week.

Demo (team and individual)

During the weekly status reports, each team and each student from that team will present their progress individually. Your job is to briefly (5 minutes)) present/demonstrate what you worked on individually during the previous week, and how your efforts are contributing to the overall success of your team’s portion of the project. You should present two or three of your most important contributions (as documented in your journal entry for the previous week).

Ways that you can demonstrate progress include

• Requirements, analysis, and design artifacts: During the early stages of the project, documenting requirements, modeling the problem domain, and developing a system design to meet the requirements are very important in order to create a solid foundation for your system. In addition, as you iterate later in the semester, it is useful to update parts of the requirements and analysis/design models in order to support further progress towards meeting the system requirements.
• Working, tested, integrated code: Assuming that your team has a solid design, this is generally the most important type of contribution.
• Prototype code: A stand-alone proof-of-concept demo is fine, especially in the early stages of the project. Prototypes can quickly inform you of the viability of an idea or approach. And, it will likely be code that you will ultimately throw away. As such, you should describe how your prototype effort will ultimately contribute to the main code base.
• Equipment/apparatus: If your project has external equipment or apparatus, then you can show us progress on its construction and setup. However, time spent on equipment/apparatus should be the mininum necessary to support the needs of the software you are creating.

Team meeting

In addition to the individual meetings, each sub-team will present their overall accomplishments and progress (5-10 minutes for each sub-team).

Evaluation

For each weekly meeting, you (individually) will receive one of the following evaluations:

• 5 - Exceeds expectations: We think you are making an extraordinary contribution to your project, and that overall, your team is on course to demonstrate a very strong final product.
• 4 - Meets expectations: We think you are making an adequate contribution to your project, and that your team is on track for a solid (but perhaps not exceptional) final product.
• 3 - Below expectations: We are concerned that you are not making a sufficient contribution to your team’s project, and that your team’s final product will not meet the minimum expectations.
• 2 - Insufficient: We observed very little evidence that you conducted productive work over the last week and the project may be showing inadequate progress.
• 1 - Extremely weak: We observed almost no or mostly trivial work performed over the last week, which resulted in very little progress.
• 0 - Unacceptable: No work was performed over the last week.

NOTE: Late weekly journal entries will receive a 50% deduction from the grade they would have otherwise received.