| COURSE CHRONOLOGY |
2024-04-27 Soon the campus will start spamming students to conduct course evals. We absolutely want your feedback but I hope you hold off until the last day of class to offer yours in 435. We do a lot with measurement and that includes course properties too. I will bring more questions and instruments to our last day of class together, and the data you offer will be more useful when all the surveys and materials are harvested at the same time. And, after all, it seems sensible to see the last act of the play before you offer a critique on the performance! We will reserve time from that last session for you to conduct these too. |
2024-04-25 Lab. Plenty to do! |
2024-04-23 Discussion today on business-driven software development. |
2024-04-22 Happy Earth Day. Please take a few minutes to reflect on the role of software engineering in taking better care of my planet. |
2024-04-20 Thanks for prepping those short impacts ("broader constraints") statements, these are very useful for our accreditation audit. But alas, the powers that be decided they must also see our text for section III.D (Engineering Standards) of the final report outline too. As before we were already on the hook to write this, so the present request is to have it sooner rather than later. Sorry. I really would rather we spend 100 percent of our time on using, using and using some more our products in order to let them declare opportunities for us to improve them. But it is what it is ... Would each team please prepare the text of the "engineering standards" section (which surely is pretty short) in a word document "standards.docx" and leave in the project repo by 5PM on Friday the 26th. As before, no cover sheet needed, just prepare this page in anticipation that you can just drop it as-is into the final report. Tell how the project conforms (or should conform) to relevant and applicable standards. |
2024-04-19 The second ethics exercise is posted to your personal folder in the repo. (Specifically, I just appended additional material to the previous file.) Let's complete this and have it uploaded by 5PM the 26th. Start with your answers as in the repo from ethics-1, check out the questions I added to it, fill it out and push (not to a new file) before the deadline. |
2024-04-18 Lab today after some sync in class on status of post-CDR, pre-AT tweaks! |
2024-04-18 Since we just discussed many issues related to intellectual property, you might want to follow this up to see the emerging issues with respect to AI. |
2024-04-16 Discussion today on some of the many legal issues we must grapple with in software engineering. |
2024-04-15 The first ethics exercise is an individual exercise so we can practice applying what was discussed in class the other day. (We waited to release this now so as to not conflict with CDR preparations last week.) 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 5PM Friday. Shortly after that point I'll release a second instrument which builds on the first and will be due next week. |
2024-04-12 A busy day of design reviews and walk throughs! To one degree or another all projects will get some amount of polishing, tuning or tweaking before undertaking the full acceptance tests, which is natural. Teams will coordinate this with me when ready to go and I'll update the status page accordingly. We saw some awfully promising products! This reflects a lot of good work. And now it is time when we can finally start to win the first lessons of 435. Nobody cares we wrote a program. People care about using programs, so now we can start to get the sense of quality of our design decisions, by observing their use in customer hands. We will get more lessons when we can measure the cost of polishing, refactoring and improving our products. Remember, this is the "good to great" phase. |
2024-04-11 Lab today with guest talk by Renee Revis, a UM alumna who shared her experiences as a software/systems architect in industry. |
2024-04-10 This is an important update to our guidance for preparation of the final delivery report. To remind, we alerted teams on March 19th that a specific organization would be used in these reports, and we underscored our interest in having sound reflections on decisions affecting "broad impacts". On March 28th we advocated that teams start to offering tickets which reflect such discussions and decisions in anticipation of completing this section. I am pleased most teams responded. The update: It looks like we will need to deliver at least this section of the final report to ABET earlier than anticipated. It is something we were all due to write anyway, so it is no more work than before, just that we are moving up the due date for this text. (I can go over more of the back story during lab if you like.) Specifically, I'd like the page or two of the text which responds to final report components as excerpted below:
Place this in a file "impacts.docx" in your project repo by 5PM on the 19th. I won't need heading information, cover sheet or the like - just the submission for C(b) and C(c) of that outline. Later, when the final report is delivered, you can just drop these pages in place. It will be graded as part of the overall report delivered later. Again, all that is changing is that we need this material a bit earlier than expected in order to respond to a program assessment in engineering. Hopefully the preparation of your final report was already in progress and this is just a minor administrative step. In case it helps to focus effort, I am leaving in our class repo a copy of the rubric which is used by the program to assess how well this class promotes handling of such constraints. |
2024-04-09 Discussion today on ethics in our profession. Also, please feel free to share with me your thoughts on how the use of Decidio went today, especially if there are suggestions for improvement. Happy to have your input! |
2024-04-04 Lab! |
2024-04-02 Discussion today about coding issues in a process-centered development environment, and in particular we emphasized the importance of linking the programming decisions with measurement. |
2024-03-28 Lab with project demos and discussion about team engagement metrics. Reminder: please add tickets to reflect our consideration of generalized constraints in project designs and design process. The criteria we will evaluate as part of the final report is per ABET: "An ability to apply engineering design to produce solutions that meet specified needs with consideration of public health, safety, and welfare, as well as global, cultural, social, environmental, and economic factors." Just like we capture tickets and reflections for other parts of our project, do please make sure we accumulate material on these design criteria too. This way we can do more than a shallow job of supporting discussion at the end. |
2024-03-26 Discussion was on the big picture of validation, hoping we tie together your readings with your projects. |
2024-03-25 Welcome back from break! I hope it was a great change of pace and that we're all ready to get back in the game. I was glad to track some progress on projects in the last week. Now is a good time for us to revalidate our commitment to one another on teams and kick it up a notch as we build out the products. My best tip: have an early all-hands meeting to refresh where we are and line up the sprint as suggested in the blog post of the 17th. And in hope this facilitates some discussion: I am re-opening the Engagement Survey on our mentors site. Please conduct this before I process it Thursday morning (meaning by late Wednesday) so I can read results for our Thursday lab. We will know a lot more about where we all stand based on participation and numbers on this. |
2024-03-19 Thinking ahead ... The CDR looms large as our next overt hurdle. We will need to demonstrate a 'complete' product ready to put in hands of our clients during the 'good to great' sprint, which is followed by delivery of our spectacular products. The present note concerns this delivery. Final delivery (not the final exam) will require a substantial project report to pull together all of our deliverables. It is a team report that tells of the team decisions on the project. (This dovetails with the final exam in which we draw out individual reflections.) This product delivery report is also used for our class reporting to ABET to show that 435 in turn is delivering great engineers. This delivery report has a fixed structure, and there is a template for it in the class repository. I'm releasing it now because it will be convenient for us to drop many of its components in as we go rather than wait for a scramble at the end. In particular some of these important components have to do with analysis of constraints that applied to our products with respect to public health, safety, and welfare; and also with respect to global, cultural, social, environmental, and economic factors. To help with analysis, I will raise each of these constraints in turn in upcoming labs, and my advice is to take a bit of team time to discuss them being sure to ticket them as you go. This gives us the evidence that these important constraints are in fact being addressed in the course. You can then rely on these tickets at the end to support assertions of how your product reflects such considerations. |
2024-03-18 Grade server remains up to date, with 47 course points accounted for in our race to 100. All teams are eligible to schedule CDR now. Times go FCRS. Plan well. |
2024-03-18 (3:29PM) Team Plants gets green light to build. |
2024-03-18 (2:35PM) Team Connections gets green light to build. |
2024-03-18 (1:05PM) Team Docket gets green light to build. |
2024-03-17 Please allow me to add some perspective now that our product definitions are (mostly) locked in. With respect to credit these are worth about what a mid-term might add in other ordinary classes. With respect to time we just spent about the first third of our project timelines (with a four week sprint to complete our implementation and then four weeks "good to great" activity as we refactor based on observations of our product in hands of our customers.) But with respect to course objectives we have only just laid the groundwork for important lessons still to come. With different degrees of polish we have defined our products. Good. I think most would have benefitted from more "active discovery" - the stuff of our class discussions a month ago. Our practices revolve around recognition of a fundamental truism of this field which is that the earlier we can lock down a good decision the cheaper it is to build. (We know this means a good decision, not any decision just to have made one. All those figures, lo-fi renderings, models and storyboards I yammered about were to help you, not me.) So we've made decisions ... but we don't yet know their qualities. We're on our way to finding out about the quality of our design decisions. Any old design can be spiffed up to look grand so long as nobody ever needs to build it or use it. Our goal in 435 is to close the loop though. The fate of our projects (and grades) will be tied with these decisions. Some of the decisions may appear to us in a different light during the build time (i.e. next four weeks.) Maybe we made decisions which turn out to be very different to code that it had seemed when we only had them in our heads. We'll get to find out the cost of change. (Did we design in order to accommodate change for cheap? Or will it be expensive?) Some decisions about the shape of the product may turn out not to fully solve the problem. Did we just guess ... and guess wrong? Discovering those during client testing later is a tough time to find we need to implement changes. Those are expensive. Maybe that is the point when we appreciate those "active discovery" techniques, for not having tried enough of them. Making an informed guess about problem solution paths would have advantage good outcomes. Anyway ... we'll see the quality of those decisions soon enough too. Some of our decisions also have to do with how we handle teams. Maybe these practices need a bit of touch up too? It is pretty clear from the metrics here that not everyone is equally in the game. Finding positive ways to get everyone engaged will be pretty important in the coming weeks. I also see who is putting in the serious effort (and I hope having fun with this too!!) but you do yourself no favor by carrying less-engaged team members. Your effort to cover for the others diminishes the effort you could have invested into excellence instead of making a baseline. And it doesn't help them pass the course; those not doing the job have a pretty tough time on the final since there is little to say. Sooner will be better than later to revalidate commitment of team members, and, if needed, trigger re-teaming. One last tip in today's homily. Let's pay a little closer attention to planning as we move into full implementation. The green light exercise had a clear deadline and yet we still saw quite a lot of last minute scrambling. This lack of attention to velocity, cost estimation, dependencies and so on is typical in noob undergrad products where the mindset is to get something to toss over the wall in time. Check the box and move on. I guarantee this will not succeed in our build. I bet we will want to be able to measure whether we are getting closer to or further from articulable states, and adjust based on what we see in order to reach a good outcome by design, not chance. (That info sounds like something businesses would like for their projects too. Hmm.) Flying blind and depending on heroic efforts done in a panic at the last is a great way to fail. Your spirit guide's good and just advice is to refine team tasking, ensure you have dependencies and costs sorted out (e.g. Gantt chart), plan on incremental releases of functionality which can be independently used and more. Converge to success. |
2024-03-15 (4:05PM) Team Decidio gets green light to build. |
2024-03-14 (4:20PM) Team Radiology gets green light to build. |
2024-03-14 Lab as everyone focuses on polishing off the specs! |
2024-03-14 Happy Pi Day. |
2024-03-12 Discussion today on design and design process. |
2024-03-08 Effort is picking up as we zero in on green lights to build, but a look at details suggests this effort does not seem to be falling evenly on all shoulders. Let's find a way to get everyone in the game. Many hands make light work and all that. |
2024-03-07 Lab today with deep dive on cost and value in defining our products. We went deep with each team's KPIs in order to illustrate the variety of questions which can arise in measuring product successes. (Added) We'd very much like for all teams to get invested in one another's successes. That is a sufficient reason for sharing team-specific features in our lab days. Let's red-team their projects and offer best tips, or at least pitch good questions that might trigger improvement later. However these are also very different projects, some more about research than others, and with very different measurables. We all get a broader perspective by hearing how other teams analyze problems in order to find opportunities, craft performance indicators and elaborate their designs. |
2024-03-05 Discussion today on how we express and analyze requirements. Plenty of examples given! |
2024-03-04 This week's lagniappe is our invitation to revisit your Gallup Strengths (especially the IDP we prepared after the Gallup lab) and compare these with the peer mentoring tips now that we have had a couple weeks to hear from one another. Have you been implementing the steps in your individual development plan? How do these steps relate to what your team tells you? Do the Gallup Strengths support materials still read the same to you or do you start to see new value in what they offered? Would you want to update the IDP? The essence of this reflection is to consider anew the question of what we bring to the game, and then maybe use this to help us up our game. Write this short essay and push to your personal SVN folder as "IDP2.pdf" before 7PM on Friday (8 March). |
2024-02-29 Alumni visit day! We appreciate the investment of 435 veterans into today's projects. |
2024-02-27 Discussion today on the effect of notations and models on what we can build. How we think about the problem will nuance how we learn we can solve it. We reminded everyone of notations which are available to us in order to create compact and succinct models to facilitate analysis and product definition. Observation from your spirit guide: It isn't obvious to me that we have everyone in the game at this critical time. Now is a good moment to double down on team practices and get everyone engaged. We need the creative energy from everyone on these projects. |
2024-02-23 Effort for the week shows a little more consistency, though I bet the launch would go better if we had full engagement. Now is a good time to review the mentoring tips shared with you by team members! I see some great comments there, so don't let that value go to waste. |
2024-02-22 Lab with a reading of the recent engagement survey, plus discussion about the active discovery within each of the projects. |
2024-02-20 Discussion today on active discovery techniques, which we related to class projects. |
2024-02-19 The first iteration of our team engagement survey is now open. Look for this on the mentors site under "Inquiries -> Polls". Please participate by my start of day on Thursday so I can process it in time for discussion in lab that afternoon. |
2024-02-17 Going over the week's metrics this morning and glad to see something (even if a little in some cases) for each project. Remember the focus at this point: we previously practiced planning with the scrimmage, and now we're doing it on bigger scale. Being proactive in figuring out how to get going with the class project is important. Early times of any project are fuzzy and ambiguous. It is easy to get lulled into thinking that we should just be thinking. There is a "doing" part of this too. What are specific and testable goals for the coming week? Among all the things we could achieve this week which are the ones to best take us to a great semester outcome? That's what we are interested in finding. We'll discuss discovery activities on Tuesday but it will be better if you've already exercised initiative by that point. We're burning the clock already, which you know if you have started sizing up the task and compared it with the timeline like we're engineers. Some perspective on effort: at some point, whether sooner or later, we'll become distracted by mid terms in other classes. It might seem like a blessing that 435 has no mid-terms but ... if we look carefully at the syllabus we'll notice that class project deliverables all seem to happen at about mid-term time and with about the same grade weights. So yes, attending to the 435 deliverables as if they are as important as mid-terms is important. |
2024-02-16 First week's effort shows a slow start. I bet this will pick up. I see some great peer mentoring comments tonight - the first week's tips are now visible on the mentor site so go see what was offered to you. The top tip I would share to everyone is to make sure we are talking to our team members, not about them. Unless you always talk with them in third person! Early days of any project are fuzzy and ambiguous! Don't give in to the temptation to just kick back and cogitate about it. Let's take specific steps to capture control of what is going on soon. |
2024-02-15 Okay, busy lab today but I hope productive for everyone. We worked through a lot of the specifics about how to bootstrap our projects. And the important reminder: we practiced teaming and planning in the small via our scrimmage, and mostly we did those the generic old 'old way'. Now we have a point of reference and invite trying some of the 'new ways' as we do this again with the class project. Humor me. Try out the stuff we suggest. And then we'll all see with what effect. In particular let's think about planning. In the class discussion and readings we went over process and plans in the abstract. Now we are at a point where we must choose specific steps in the project. Hmm. Instead of proceeding randomly, we know to be a little more deliberate. We will combine goals and observations into actions (or at least to plans for action.) This is the essence of critical thinking. Again ... let's be a bit more deliberate about this and see if it offers better effect that in scrimmages. |
2024-02-13 Discussion today on principles of software engineering and how they guide us through process. |
2024-02-11 Class projects are posted and we'll be getting the tasking out shortly. (UPDATE:) And indeed the tasking is out. Check your personal folder in the repo and you'll find the new project folder. In that is the file with a roster of the new team plus new VM so you have resources in common. Make sure you have what you need from your VMs since they will be recycled shortly. |
2024-02-10 Scrim 3 is in, now is the right time to reflect on just what the heck happened. How'd the plan work out? What were the friction points or barriers to getting your deliverable? What more might have been in the plan or what better process might you have taken to get a better deliverable? We just read about "process" in the abstract. Take some time to relate what you just did in the project to that backdrop. |
2024-02-08 Ended up mostly lab today, initially with discussion about practices we see in the scrimmages, and then with team time to prep for tomorrow's delivery. Pay attention to the merits of those plans as we go into the home stretch! The reflection later will help us learn how to make a better plan. We'll pick up Tuesday with the discussion on engineering principles. |
2024-02-07 A load issue on the VM server managed to wedge it tonight, so if your image locked up for a bit then this was it. I think we have it functioning again (though mostly because enough images crashed that there is less competition.) Let me know if you aren't fully restored at this point. |
2024-02-06 Discussion today on process, process models and plans, which in particular we illustrated with plans created for our scrimmages. (Once scrimmage 3 is submitted then plan on some reflection on what was the adequacy of the plan you made. This is how we learn to make better plans.) We will practice using the peer mentoring tool this week. Feel free to hop into the mentors site now to make sure you have access and understand what's going on. Any entries you make can be updated until the point when we harvest data, which will be Friday at 7PM. The idea is to invite your comments and assessment right after the team project is submitted at 5PM. Please give your ratings, explain (simply) what each team member did - including for yourself - and indicate your willingness to work with that person again. Unlike other instruments we will use, these comments will not be shared with the other team members. |
2024-02-05 In answer to a good question, CE majors are invited to append the relevant upper level ENEE classes to the spreadsheet in our survey, and thanks. Also: all grading remains up to date and we have accounted for 21 points in the race to 100 for the semester. |
2024-02-03 The 400-level course survey which I mentioned in class is released. This appears as a CSV file in your personal folder. Edit it to place an "X" in the first column on each line for the 400-level CMSC course and instructor you have taken or are taking now, and of course commit the changes. Feel free to add lines (keeping same format) for other relevant classes (like ENEE or grad classes in CS.) This survey a bit low tech but seems to get the job done. Please do by Thursday morning so I have time to compile results. |
2024-02-02 Both scrimmages are in and grading will be done shortly this evening. Take the time to reflect on what the heck happened in the last week, dig deeper perhaps in the Gallup Strengths reports as you complete the IDP, and focus on healthy practices over the weekend. We can pick up on Monday with a strong push on scrimmage 3. (Added) Sample data for scrim 3 is posted to the class repo. |
2024-02-01 A hodgepodge today, with quick lab discussion on repository and VM practices, then general intro to SE as an exercise in communication. We'll continue that discussion next time by moving into processes and process models, and with an eye toward identifying clear principles to guide us in the engineering process. |
2024-01-30 Lab today covered strengths - what we bring to the game. We illustrated in detail the sort of introspection that will make effective use of the Gallup Strengths materials. Complete that exercise off-line and upload the results per discussion today. And if you haven't done so already, please remember to upload the resume, goals and Gallup report, since we will still rely on these for other exercises yet to come. Some supplemental materials as mentioned in class today are:
All good stuff! |
2024-01-30 Grading is up to date. 5 of 100 course points accounted for. (Remember: Collect the points, get the grade.) |
2024-01-25 Urk. Today in class I expressed my frustration at starting the semester mid-week, so we are off in our usual rotation of "Tues class, Thurs lab". One consequence is I screwed up the assignment date for submitting initial instruments. This is now corrected - your Gallup, resume and goals materials will be due SOB next Tuesday, not this morning. |
2024-01-25 Plenty of action items coming up. Let's get these in the queue in order to 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 435. All present 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, January 31. Scrimmage 1 (the first group exercise)is a two-foot putt: By 0700 on Friday, February 2nd, 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 (February 9th.) For this just follow your plan, collect solutions and tell me how to find more such solutions. (Foreshadowing: by that point we will have surveyed all sorts of simple ways that some 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; write a reasonable program that lets me solve problems.) (Cover sheet: yes.) The problem to solve: For input of a closed curve in 2-space, find four points on that curve which form a rectangle. There, how's that for simple? A few details you might need to know:
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2024-01-25 First day of class. We spent discussion today setting expectations of one another for the semester. Our action items for Tuesday 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. Next class will be the start of our work on team formation and strengths. Bring your Gallup materials! |
2024-01-24 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 Thursday. |
2024-01-04 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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