| COURSE CHRONOLOGY |
2024-12-18 The marathon grading session is over, grade server is updated with scores, repository is updated with grading summary and course grades are posted to campus (where they should update for you overnight.) Look for one final reflection in email shortly. |
2024-12-16 Exams are submitted and I'm now grading at best speed. Thanks to those who let me know that you finished early, this has let me get a head start on something I know we all want over with as soon as possible. Meanwhile I am releasing the grading rubrics on class projects. |
2024-12-13 I can I resist the opportunity
to release a final exam on Friday the 13th?
The final exam is |
2024-12-05 A spectacular wrap up to the semester with summary of learning objectives, discussion of project outcomes and plenty of specifics about how to approach the final exam. |
2024-12-05 The class project is a wrap! Well, except for talking about it on the final exam coming up. More discussion about this in our last class together today. |
2024-12-03 Demo day! |
2024-12-02 Our last offering of our engagement survey is now open on the mentors site. Please conduct by 7AM Wednesday. The last mentors tips to offer to your team members is open now and will be closed at 5PM Thursday. Share your thoughts about how best to succeed in the future. The campus is surely spamming you for Course Evals now - please resist until end of class on Thursday so we can add some additional topics you might consider addressing. The review of your team members will open on the mentors site at 5PM Thursday. These are only for me and not shared. Please let us know who did what and how well they did it. This will close at end of the day on Friday. The verbatim survey will appears as a text document in your SVN folder early on Thursday and we welcome your thoughts by end of the day Friday. |
2024-11-25 At this point teams should be rolling in data and observations of clients using our products live out in the wild. I don't think we are completely there but hope springs eternal since this gives a wealth of opportunity to adjust, refactor and polish our products before final delivery next week. Teams in this situation will have plenty upon which to reflect. Our time next week will almost certainly be consumed with completing the final delivery report, our report on acceptance testing, our advertising materials and more. Please don't skimp on these. As should be apparent by now, the days of just arguing that technically a program worked are over. We are delivering products. Success depends on value in hands of our clients. The rubric for scoring products has been available for quite a while now so it will be no mystery about what we need to see. Let's make Demo Day a good one! Each team will have 12 minutes to pitch a self-contained statement of the problem and demonstrate how we solve that problem. Focus on value, make it accessible. Practice the pitch. Also, ensure you know how to set up the display so you make best use of time in what will have to be hard limits. An exhaustive tour of features seems not the best use of limited time; a clear demonstration of value is the win. We will have a number of visitors looking in, so let's paint the best image of our accomplishments. The last week will be busy.
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2024-11-22 So most teams are at the point of discovering ways that our "working" software nevertheless doesn't seem to do the right things in hands of customers. Cool! Not that we have remediation in our future but that now we get to see the real effects of design decisions in ways not previously available to us in previous courses. Evaluate these carefully! We will want to hear about them on the final exam, of course, but we also want to make sure we are refining our code appropriately. Let's genuinely refactor with quality in mind, and take note of the cost of that along the way. Let's not slap patches on and move it out. The goal is not to bury defects, it is to expose them so we can eliminate them entirely for our clients. Weirdly, effort remains mixed this week even as we are getting down to the wire. |
2024-11-21 Team time! |
2024-11-19 Discussion today on legal issues in SE, then over to some team time. |
2024-11-18 We start what is for most practical purposes the last week when we can complete tech work done on projects. All teams need to be running acceptance tests of our products as in the hands of our clients, and we need time yet to refactor based on those observations. The final days going into the 5th will almost certainly be consumed by crafting and polishing final reports. Now is a very very good time to apply our principles, focus in following the sound processes we've worked out, reflect on what's going on (think ahead to that epic final exam) and power through. We need all members of a team engaged for this sprint, so this is when we either reap the benefits of having invested in relationships early in the semester or realize the costs of not having done so. Stay alert! The pace of lessons is going to keep picking up. |
2024-11-15 Another week with effort way down. With the end in sight, the win though is from steady and sustained investment. Team engagement is also more a topic in mentoring notes. Now that rubber is meeting the road, we are seeing more frank and open comments to one another. Good! So the reflection opportunity is this: what team engagement practices might have been done earlier in the semester to have brought everyone together so as to better sustain engagement now that we are in the thick of it? Second ethics exercise is posted to your SVN folder. Complete this and update the file in place by 7PM on Friday, 22 November. |
2024-11-14 Team time! |
2024-11-12 Discussion today on ethics issues in software engineering. They are closer than one might think. In addition, the first ethics exercise posts. It is an individual exercise so we can practice applying what was discussed in class today. Look for this in your personal repo folder - ethics-1.txt - and just follow the directions. Edit this document in place and then commit the changed file by 7PM Friday. Shortly after that point I'll release a second instrument which builds on the first and will be due next week. |
2024-11-11 A few thoughts about our end game... Time sure is wasting. All teams have some amount of tweaking and tuning to complete before launching acceptance tests. (Some more so than others.) Remember, we need to see the systems generate value in the hands of our clients, not just test our own code to declare functionality right. Those are awfully different things, and if we don't appreciate that now then we miss the value of this course. So let's see. We need time to set up for the ATs. We need time to conduct the ATs. We need time to analyze and refactor based on the ATs. And we need time to prep the final delivery and sundry reports. That seems like a lot of time when we have very little left. Start from the end date - Thursday, the 5th - and work back to see how it lays out. There are only a few days between return from Thanksgiving until End of Time. That pretty much will be used up scrambling on the extensive final reporting obligations. Thanksgiving? Let's all be real about this: nothing useful will happen over Thanksgiving. That means we need next week to refactor and tune the products based on discoveries in acceptance tests. Hmm. This means we need systems completed and ready to start ATs this week. Plan tasking accordingly! Each team should let me know when we think the post-CDR tweaking is completed. Once we are in agreement, then we can start the AT's. I will also update the status board accordingly. |
2024-11-11 A hearty thanks goes out to veterans in the class who may have served. Much appreciated! |
2024-11-10 Happy birthday to any Jarheads in the class - 249 years young! |
2024-11-07 We revisited agile methods and in particular illustrated its role in business-driven software development. Then team time since we need it! |
2024-11-05 Discussion on management practices and even more on measurement, which we illustrated using features of our class projects. |
2024-11-01 Another week with a mixed picture on effort. |
2024-10-31 Another lab on metrics, looking at what effort, commit churn and burndown charts offer to anyone intent on tracking success. Then project updates and demos. I hope these topics feel connected since that is the intent! |
2024-10-29 Discussion on coding practices in process-centric dev environment, plus the role of metrics (of many kinds) in guiding our investment of effort during dev. |
2024-10-25 A very mixed story with effort this week. |
2024-10-24 The final exam will be a take home that is due 6PM on 16 December. The exam will be released no less than 48 hours in advance of that point. |
2024-10-24 Lab today with discussion of project metrics plus team engagement, then presentations on project status. |
2024-10-22 To answer the questions for everyone: We are looking to schedule a 90 minute block of time for our CDRs. No, it it is not required, though we would love to find a way to involve everyone so we all have the value of the experience. Yes, we are focused on scheduling during regular business hours, which for some of us can be earlier in the day than the younglings are used to. |
2024-10-22 Discussion on the big picture of validation and testing, intended to connect our readings in support texts to specifics in our projects. |
2024-10-20 We should have already been building but now that we are officially following our plans, let's take the pulse of team members and see how we are doing with engagement. Our Gallup-inspired Q7 survey is open again on the mentors site. Please take this now (or at least by some point on Wednesday) with expectation we'll review it in class in lab on Thursday. |
2024-10-18 All green lights are in. Now all we have to do is follow the plan. There was a bit of drop off of effort this week. But now it is a whole new ballgame. |
2024-10-18 (4:30PM) Team SEL gets green light to build. |
2024-10-18 (3:50PM) Team Connections gets green light to build. |
2024-10-18 (3:15PM) Team Plants gets green light to build. |
2024-10-18 (2:20PM) Team Lexicography gets green light to build. |
2024-10-17 Lab exercise today - an antemortem reflection to anticipate ways the project would have failed if that is the case in December. Presumably now we won't fail for any of these reasons. |
2024-10-16 IEEE's SWEBOK (Software Engineering Body of Knowledge) v4.0 is released today. This is more than adequate for use with your support materials in 435 and is a legit/free download. A good time to date your materis! |
2024-10-16 (2:00PM) Team Radiology gets green light to build. |
2024-10-15 Design, design process and design evaluation. |
2024-10-14 We should be building right now. Honest. Situation awareness is important in projects. Take 435 for example. (Okay, you have ...) Everyone needs to juggle many responsibilities in life. This includes balancing time between course obligations. 435 doesn't have a mid-term per se, so potentially there is a sense that velocity here can drop a bit in order to prioritize mid-terms in other classes. Indeed 435 doesn't have a mid-term. It does have a spec deliverable worth one letter grade though. Same later. When other courses are having another round of mid-terms, we have a CDR worth one letter grade. Magically it all kind of works out. What's different in 435 is that you are in charge of figuring out how to map the team's timeline into our hard constraints. Don't let the lack of immediacy in our project paint an illusion that we are on track. Apocalyptic hackathons at the last minute never work out well for anyone. One pro tip: Take a moment to refresh the outline of our delivery report, as found in the file "report-template.docx" in class repo. This has elements to be filled in which you may find useful to anticipate now, not try to recreate at the end. |
2024-10-12 A few more thoughts for our weekend reflection ... I keep promoting these active discovery techniques. They help us win a clearer vision of what we are going to build, and help us confirm that indeed we all share the same vision. They remove mystery. (Okay, at least they reduce it.) If we find ourselves pitching a proposal for green light while wondering whether it will actually solve the problem or feeling concerned about what the customer will think of it (much less confused about what we might build) then ... pretty clearly we have not yet modeled, piloted or storyboarded enough. The implementation sprint is a tough time to discover important details that might be costly to walk back. Remember: you're constructing this spec for you not for me. |
2024-10-11 We close the week with no green lights to build, meaning our implementation sprint will be more compressed. This is an okay thing if our time to this point is invested for strong clarity on what will ensure client success, but running the clock without commensurate illumination would be less than ideal. Effort so far pretty modest, and lower than last week. Again, this is okay if we are measurably on track but so far there are no such metrics to suggest that is the case. And we're missing the energies of a couple team members too. This will be a great weekend to reflect on what active discovery techniques we might have been using or could still try on the way to having spectacular build plans. And at the same time, reflect on what steps will help the team pull together. None of us is as strong as all of us. |
2024-10-10 Discussion on where we are on identifying KPIs of respective projects, and relating this to acceptance testing. Then plenty of team time as the completion of green light documents becomes more pressing. |
2024-10-08 Discussion on analysis of requirements documents. |
2024-10-04 A productive week! We're still discovering nuances, needs, constraints and more about the problem space, but also starting to make some tentative decisions about ways forward. Use your models, try those decisions on for size (and for cheap!) and think through the implications of each. What does it get you? What does it cost? What could go wrong? There is no one-and-done design step here, only a process. Converge to that good solution. The time is pretty compressed, no question about that, but illumination early can let us find the simple build plan that lurks inside the complex problem statement. Use the focusing tips we've talked about in class. Try these techniques on for size. Reflect this weekend on where we've been and where we are. I bet you'll find that you have already come a long way. There's a long way to go too, but from where I sit the view shows all project teams are seriously in the hunt. Glad for this! |
2024-10-03 Discussion today on expression of requirements. |
2024-10-01 Discussion today on modeling and practices for capturing requirements. |
2024-09-27 A productive week and nice start on use of active discovery techniques. Piloting ideas, tech, presentations and more are critical at the start. We stimulate generation of features that inform us how to make designs rather than just guess at designs. We probably need to do this more! But from the several deep dive meetings with teams in the last two days it is clear that we're starting to get it. Let's get it more! Effort reporting is mixed, and I think in most cases this is from people not logging time or offering reflections during this fairly formative time of the project. And I'm still not seeing all the thoughtful tips to peers we might have hoped for. These are trivial tasks but help us up our game, so how about it. |
2024-09-26 Great interaction today with our alumni who came to help red team our project pitches. Thanks for their gift of time and expertise! |
2024-09-24 Oh yeah: we also learned the new phrase "On time is late." |
2024-09-24 Should have been much discussion today about modeling and requirements capture, but we used most of the time on productive interaction on projects - time well invested. |
2024-09-23 Let's be explicit on where we are in the process. We've asked you to read up on discovery, modeling and requirements capture in support materials. We will continue to talk a lot about it in class. And magically these are activities which ought to be going on with the projects. Almost like it is all supposed to go together. Humor us and give it a try. Hopefully we have all now made contact with clients and had a kickoff session to learn substantively about the starting points for discovery. This gives us a few days to come up with draft ways forward to pitch to our visitors on Thursday. This first plan won't be what we end up doing! It is only a starting point for the genuine discovery. Again: humor us and give it a try. Adding two small individual instruments to our new work week. First, as mentioned in lab on Thursday, is our Engagement Survey (what I referred to as the Q7 as homage to its origin in the Gallup Q12). This is open now on the mentors site - look for the Inquiries tab and it is a poll under that. You can fill it out when you like and update as you like until I harvest data Thursday morning, which means fill it out by Wednesday night. Second is an updated goals exercise. One of your first obligations was to call out your goals for this course. How are you doing on that so far? Start with the statement you committed earlier and elaborate on your progress. Let's think traceability here, and practice supporting any statements we make and reflect on what we might do to up our game. Make sense? Commit the new statement as "goals2.docx" - which means we save both documents since we'll compare these side by side later in the semester. Complete this by late Friday meaning I'll check them in my first work session on Saturday morning. Don't forget to complete our regular mentoring tips to team members by COB Friday as well. |
2024-09-20 A mix of launch velocities this week, at least according to the effort reporting. Largely we get the same picture from observable reports of activity (client meetings and so on). Potentially there are reports or notes in places that are not observable, but if we can't see it then it is tough to rely on in telling the story later, like on final exam. Think about it. Now that we've started another reporting period remember to check in on the mentor site to see what tips your team members may have shared with you! And one more tip: when offering these tips, remember to speak to your team member, not in third person. |
2024-09-20 Fresh VMs issued for project teams, info by usual convention is in the project folder teaminfo file. |
2024-09-19 Lab today to illustrate active discovery techniques, which almost certainly are things we need to be trying in these early stages of the class projects. There was not a lot of inquiry on the shape of our 'green light' proposals yet, but to keep things going let me just mention that examples of full specs are in the class repo so you can see the sorts of things done in the past. |
2024-09-17 Happy Constitution Day! Class was robust discussion about new projects, how to get boostrapped and we started early discussion about active discovery practices. We emphasized that early times in a projects are the most important times since we set the pace and trajectory. Let's get it right from the start! |
2024-09-16 Class project info is now released! Check the problem statements for details on what we will conduct this semester. The details of deliverables and timing are all contained in our timeline doc. Specific tasking is pushed to your personal folders, so check that now to see the project you'll be on, and also in that file is a Subversion URL for the team's shared project folder. That will have the team roster, and once virtual machines are set up for the new projects I will push that info there too. We will surely discuss in class tomorrow how to get started, but anticipate that we'd like to see a team charter pushed by end of the week. In it we'll see a commitment on when the whole team will meet (and we mean face to face) and also what touch points will be regularly on the schedule during the work week. We'll also want to see a commitment from each team member about what they bring to the game and how anyone will tell they did. Anticipate that at end of semester we will ask (among other things) whether you brought it. The mentors site is refreshed - double check that it has you with the correct teams. |
2024-09-15 A short public service note unrelated to 435 ... "My name is Erin Hill and I am a doctoral student in the Counseling Psychology program here at the University of Maryland. For my dissertation, I am researching the mental health experiences of undergraduate women who experienced the separation or divorce of their parents during college. Would you please forward the attached flyer to undergraduate students in your courses? Recruiting this population can be challenging and assistance from faulty members can make a huge difference in the success of this study. Participants will receive a $10 Amazon gift card or ½ UMD SONA Credit for completing the study. The study can be found here: go.umd.edu/divorce." |
2024-09-15 Scrimmage 3 grading summary is up. |
2024-09-13 Scrimmage 3 is a wrap, at least until do some analysis of these materials in lab. Some pretty good submissions and I love that we will have much to talk about! In mean time: this is weekend so reflect and get your batteries recharged for a new week. My weekend will be consumed with reviewing these materials and getting the new projects posted early in the coming week. |
2024-09-12 Lab today, going over practices to follow for rest of the semester (ticketing and peer mentoring), plus plenty of gab about process modeling using our scrimmage 3 exercise for illustration. |
2024-09-10 Discussion today on planning and principles. |
2024-09-08 Two new tasks this week. 400-level course survey This is something you can take care of early to get out of the way. I left a primitive spreadsheet of courses in your personal folder, and would like if you'd drop an "X" in the first column next to each 400-level CS course you have or are currently taking, then commit the edited file. These data are pretty useful for when we sort out tasking on the class projects, which will happen very soon, so thanks for taking care of this by Thursday morning. Peer reviews are tasks you will perform throughout your career. You will review and mentor colleagues. This is something we will start soon. I've set up our mentors site with the current groups and invite you to offer me an assessment of each of your team members - including yourself - by logging in (usual campus directory ID) and going to the Advice -> Add tab. Entry is live - no separate "submit" is needed and you can change or update it as you like up to the deadline. Ideally this is something you'd do after the team submits the project on Friday, or at least after the bulk of the work is done, so we have the best input, but in any case I will harvest the data at 6PM on Friday which is after scrimmage 3 is due. In the free text box, offer a simple description of what the team member did and how well they did it. Please be clear and let us know your thoughts on working with them again. These data are only for me; they are not shared. Later we will have a weekly obligation to offer mentoring tips to team members, and those data will be anonymized and shared. Historically these reviews have been pretty well received by students, since at this point in our careers we often do not know much about how we are perceived by others. This is a way to get tips on how to up our game and make an even more effective team. The site is open now in case you want to play with it, and you can (and should) update it with the final values on Friday. |
2024-09-07 Scrim 1 and 2 are graded with comments uploaded per convention. Come to class Tuesday prepared to talk about your specific plans as they relate to the big picture of process/planning from our Thursday discussion - we will have much to talk about. For those keeping track in advance of schedule adjustment deadline, the grade server is up to date, and 21 course points are accounted for. |
2024-09-05 Animated discussion today again on why we care about principles as segue to deep dive on process modeling. More of the same on Tuesday coming up. |
2024-09-04 Grade server is up to date and remains something we should all track regularly. |
2024-09-03 Discussion today started with a number of practicalities related to project management and practices; we offered a lot of examples of how software engineering has been done wrong in the past (which is to say, we motivated why we care about certain practices); and we started laying the foundation for our more substantive discussion about principles and why we care. |
2024-08-31 Weekends are for reflection in 435, and here are some supplemental materials to help with that. Quality improvement is an on-going game.
All good stuff! |
2024-08-30 At this moment the grade server is up to date (9 course points accounted for), ten scrimmage teams are assigned and we have a weekend to reflect before starting again fresh in the coming week. Have a safe holiday weekend and we will pick up Tuesday with discussion about the big picture material in SE and get on quickly to process. |
2024-08-29 A good lab today with plenty of discussion about what makes a good team member. We gave some things to try, we discussed at length what we bring to the game (aided by Gallup materials) and we are off and running on the first scrimmages due next week. |
2024-08-28 Plenty of action items coming up. Let's get these in the queue early to help you plan effectively. First, an individual exercise to practice simple tasks in the small (for cheap) in order have confidence we're heading in the right direction later when things become large (and expensive.) Mailtools is a Linux-based system created in a prior class. 435 students should be able to access this project in our repository at https://vis.cs.umd.edu/svn/projects/mailtools/src (using appropriate SVN tools, of course.) The simple (individual) exercise is to tell us about its "Space Invader" feature. Who was its author, and how many commits are related to it (just this feature, not the full Mailtools product)? Don't agonize over answers; derive reasonable responses for each of the above questions, place your answers in a file "svnfun.txt" and check it into the root folder of your personal repository by 0700 on Wed, September 4. Scrimmage 1 (the first group exercise) is a two-foot putt: By 0700 on Friday, Friday, September 6, set up your assigned VM as a web server. Put up something that would convince a skeptical visitor landing on that site that the server relies on a database. Ensure your VM itself evidences basic care, maintenance and security. (Some students are cyber mavens - cool, so to be clear, this is not an obligation for you to go nuts with defense!) Per convention for group assignments, please submit a cover sheet, according to the conventions for digital signatures with the template in your group folder. This exercise serves as a forcing function to get everyone on a group in some form or other; it lets us practice conventions for projects; and it is a good opportunity to practice following our "do the right thing" directive. Heads up! Scrimmage 2 will be due at COB that same Friday. This is also an easy target (problem statement is below), but will require talking with your group in order to sort it out. Write a "plan" for how you intend to solve the problem. The deliverable is your plan in Word document as "scrimmage02.docx". It should persuade me as an ostensible product manager that you are on track and can solve my problem. (Cover sheet: yes.) Scrimmage 3 is due at COB the following Friday (September 13th). (Date corrected!) For this just follow your plan. (Foreshadowing: by that point we will have surveyed all sorts of simple ways that a product can fail for want of technologists anticipating what users actually need. Your mission is not to replicate such defects in this exercise. Don't just write a program; solve the problem.) (Cover sheet: yes.) The problem - a capability we'd like to have: We'd like to study the Gallup Strengths of groups of participants in order to understand their role in project outcomes. There, how's that for simple? Give me what I need in order to succeed. An observational study is motivated by many kinds of questions. What are patterns of strengths of students in 435? Are they uniformly distributed or is there a distinct 'geek slant' to them? Do team engagement practices have differing effects depending on the team strength profile? Are there patterns of practices/profiles which most predict later team success in the project? Those are just some of the questions we'd like to answer. Obviously we'd also like to have a system to enable capture, visualization and analysis of Strengths data over time. Some considerations to put on your radar early: First, we will be pretty concerned with usability and work flow. A system that technically allows data analysis but with high-overhead data entry costs is probably a non-starter for us. Next, we are interested in sound visualization options; since this is an observational study, it isn't obvious what sort of questions someone might want to ask, or what patters may emerge, so we turn to visualization techniques in order to let the eye recognize maybe what hadn't occurred to the user via straight statistical methods. And we are interested in tracking such things over time, so decent schema is important in tools that scale. Note that the Gallup site where you bought your study offers a pairwise comparison of users' Strengths. It's pretty slick and offers a reasonable starting point to see what kinds of things are possible to visually compare, though it does not offer the analytic properties nor scale to groups. Don't feel compelled to shoehorn your solution into that presentation; that is offered as illustration. See if you can do it one better. A few details on process you might need to know:
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2024-08-27 First day of class. We spent discussion today setting expectations of one another for the semester. Our action items for Thursday are as already announced earlier in the blog. Keep interacting with one another to form a team; send me the directory IDs of your four person team and I will issue you a group repo which also gets you access to your VM. Feel free to get settled in there in anticipation of our first simple group project in the coming week. Some random tidbits from today's class:
Grade server remains up to date. Next class will be the start of our work on team formation and strengths. Bring your Gallup materials! |
2024-08-26 And we're under way! Repository credentials have been emailed to your address of record, so usual convention, if this is a surprise to you then check the spam folder or contact me soon so you can get set up. The initial assignments are due as detailed below, and we'll see you in class on Tuesday. |
2024-08-23 A new semester is just around the corner. We're sharing the the first assignments for those who want to get an early start.
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