Project Expectations

Expectations

To earn credit for your yearlong project, you are expected to put in around 20 hours of effort each week. In addition, you are expected to attend weekly team meetings with your faculty advisor, come prepared to that meeting with an agenda, document your accomplishments and submit weekly individual status reports, and attend and participate in weekly all-program meetings. Each team also is required to submit one team progress report each week. At the end of the quarter each team is required to submit a completed project notebook, prepare a poster and participate at the end of the year software fair.

You will be evaluated on the basis of your efforts and your contributions to your team project. Input to the final evaluation includes individual status reports, peer evaluations, weekly meetings with faculty advisor, project notebook, and presentation at the software fair.

Status Reports

Each individual is required to submit a weekly status report. The status report must contain the following:

§ Subject heading include: Project name, your name, and week, i.e., Individual Status Report for <student>, <project> - Week <week>, e.g., Individual Status Report for Randy Keller, Sphinx - Week 1

§ Body includes: Accomplishments, Objectives for next week, and Issues.

§ "Accomplishments" is a high level overview of what tasks you actually accomplished or made progress on. At the same time it contains enough substantive detail in order to understand what you actually did.

§ "Objectives for next week" is a list of the tasks that you will be working on - your plan for next week.

§ "Issues" is any concerns or items that need attention. (Task - a specific piece of well-defined work.)

Additionally, we strongly encourage you to keep and optionally submit a time log. This makes writing status reports easier, as you can review your efforts and then write the overview. One way to do this is to keep a Project Notebook, where you jot down notes on what you are working on, and the date and times.

Progress reports. Each team is strongly encouraged to designate a project manager who is responsible for submitting a weekly progress report that summarizes the teams' progress. It includes status on the major milestones, when the next release is, if the schedule is slipping and any other major issues.

Work time: The ACC is reserved 11 hours a week for students to work jointly on your projects. To increase the potential for success, we strongly encourage you to designate work times where all team members are present and working independently in the ACC. This enables quick clarifications to questions and issues.