2025-02-06 Per discussion today I've released they survey of 400-level courses, which will help me a lot in the tasking and project scoping coming up. This appears as a new CSV file in your home folder. Please edit that in place to add an X in first column of courses you have taken or are in now. (Feel free to append additional courses of interest, say, if you have been in a CS grad course.) The priority now is of course to complete scrimmages for tomorrow! But then please take a moment for this survey and push before 0700 Wednesday morning.

2025-02-06 We explored process models, processes, planning and related practices, with heavy emphasis on why such things matter. Prototyping came up along the way too. Then over to some lab team time.

2025-02-05 A PSA for those keeping tabs on such things: The grade server remains up to date, and 11 course points (in the race to 100) have been accounted for to date. My goal is always to ensure there is graded material returned to students in advance of the campus schedule adjustment deadline - Friday in this case. By early Friday we will have accounted for 16 points, and I have every hope that I'll get scrimmage 1 graded by mid day. Scrimmage 2 is due late in the day though, which puts timely grading in doubt for those estimating the glide path to some target grade. If your team would like that grading done earlier then feel free to submit it by the early deadline and send me email to that effect. I can only promise that I'll try! But I do want everyone to have best information possible in case a decision rides on it.

2025-02-04 Class today discussion about what is in our scope of study in software engineering, which we approached by going over ways we know it has not been done well in the past. We started to motivate consideration of principles of SE, which we will continue with moving forward. We gave the balance of time over to discussion about what to put in your plans for the scrimmage. What goes in your plan? Once you have had a chance to think about it (and submit as scrimmage 2) I'm looking forward to comparing plans to show the many different things people might put (or not) in such a document. Later of course we will see how those plans worked out, by means of scrimmage 3.

2025-01-31 At this moment the grade server is up to date, nine scrimmage teams are assigned and we have a weekend to reflect before starting again fresh in the coming week.

To assist in reflection please consider these supplemental materials. Quality improvement is an on-going game after all.

• LinkedIn Learning is a useful place to fish for fairly compact tutorials on software process and team practices. The material there by Chris Croft is a very nice starting point. And you can't beat the price.
• Theme Thursday is a place to visit after you've completed your Strengths reflections. This site features Gallup coaches working with project managers to tease out what the various strengths bring to the game.

Have a holiday weekend (Groundhog Day coming up, right?) and we will pick up Tuesday with discussion about the big picture in SE then get quickly on to principles and process.

2025-01-30 A 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. Remember to followup the practice today with a deeper dive into your Gallup Strengths, and then upload the expanded IDP to your personal folder in the repo.

2025-01-28 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, February 5.

Scrimmage 1 (the first group exercise) is a two-foot putt: By 0700 on Friday, Friday, February 7, 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 14th). 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 visualization but with high-overhead data entry costs is probably a non-starter for us. Next, we are interested in rich 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 visualization 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. But to be clear: we are not looking for just another way to mosh records into a bland statistical soup. A stat summary is fine if you choose to offer it as an extra, but help us visualize relationships between all participants. Don't discard information. Enrich it.

A few details on process you might need to know:

1. We're not defining many details. "Do the right thing." By now I hope you're all figuring out that ambiguity is something we erase by exercising initiative to find what is necessary for mission success, not something we interpret for convenience. The 'client' in this problem seeks a reasonable way to understand more about teams and Strengths. Maybe it offers actionable information for future team formation. Help him win this illumination.
2. Focus your solution on the VM as assigned or in materials you deliver to run on my platforms. Figuring out how to manage the shared resource and fit a solution inside it is part of the exercise. Back doors to AWS servers or other cloud-based services won't fly.
3. Engineering is problem solving under constraints. Find the best way forward with the time and resources we have available. A perfect solution which can't be completed until late spring is not a solution. A toy that only enables simulation, not real analysis, is not a solution. A work flow that demands huge investment of my time to test with all the data from students in this class - or recent semesters - is not a solution.

2025-01-28 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:

• "On time is late."
• The grade server's zero-weight instruments ("phony baloney bonus points") are a way to offer insight on how other professionals might see your performance. We notice! So thanks to the several of you who jumped on the first assignment before class today - the early initiative got some points. So did the intrepid adventurers who were first to engage in class with questions. Thanks! Looking forward to hearing the rest of you engage too!
• There are many ways we can interact, and commit messages on repository activity is another of them. These let me offer feedback and mentoring tips. If you're not tracking the messages we send from time to time then you aren't getting full value of the course.
• In steady state our work week will typically be a Tuesday discussion with some kind of lab activity on Thursdays. At start of semester we'll be a little out of cycle while we set a foundation; towards end of semester we'll err on the side of having more team time.
• Work week is for work. Pour it on. Weekends are for reflection. Let the lessons soak in. Plan accordingly.
• Scrimmage assignments will be posted presently with the first due Friday week.
• Details count!

Grade server remains up to date.

Next class will be the start of our work on team formation and strengths. Bring your Gallup materials!

2025-01-27 And we're under way! Repository credentials will have been emailed to your address of record as of Monday morning, so per usual convention, if this is a surprise to you then check your spam folder or contact me soon so you can get set up. The initial assignments are due as detailed below. We'll see you in class on Tuesday.

2025-01-03 A new semester is just around the corner. We're sharing the the first assignments for those who want to get an early start.

• Review our guide on Expectations Management! Please make sure we are all clear about what we're getting into by reviewing the guide Is 435 right for me?

• Get started on the first assignments! Getting these very small tasks out of the way will keep the decks cleared for more interesting things once the semester arrives.

  1. Purchase your Clifton Strengths assessment. This skills assessment is for our exercises on team building and is available for a student discounted rate from the folks at Gallup: Clifton Strengths for Students (The "Top 5" report is adequate for our needs, but the student version offers those and more at the same price.) Save and study the PDF reports, which are specific to each person; place the Signature Themes Report in your Subversion folder (which you will receive first day of semester.)
  2. Update your resume. Prepare this as a PDF document. Please only share details with which you are comfortable. We use the content later in sorting out talents for teams and projects, and to figure out early who knows how to follow directions (which is one of the most basic skill sets of our business.) Place this in a PDF document "resume.pdf" in your repository folder as well.
  3. Prepare a thoughtful statement of what you want to get out of 435. Craft this as a Word document, and place it in your Subversion folder as file "goals.docx".

   

  In general we judge more than just the payload of your submissions, so please remember that evidence of timeliness, preparation and planning always count. Everything you do reflects on you.

• Students on the waitlist should plan to attend the class from day one and perform the above assignments in anticipation of being admitted to the section. We only issue repository credentials to enrolled students, so if (and only if) you are on the waitlist then email the professor with your submissions attached before the deadlines; this will ensure your work is treated as on-time should you be able to add the class later.

• Pro tip: Commit to success from day one. We rely on workmanship offered in early assignments when making decisions on teaming and tasking, so consider seriously what we will have to work with. Overall, exercise of initiative in the interest of quality is rewarded, so pay attention, demonstrate decent critical thinking skills and focus on success from the start. Do that and we'll make the semester worth your while.

• Assignments On the first day of the semester we will email credentials for access to the class repository (which is one of several ways we will communicate this semester) to each student registered. Our first assignments (as above) will be due by SOB on Thursday, January 30th.

• Teams We will form four-person teams starting the first day of class. These teams will conduct practice exercises ("scrimmages") early in semester in order to get used to some of the basics before we tackle the class project. You're free to form these teams as you like, though don't panic if you don't know anyone else in class since we'll make time available adjacent to each class in order to meet one another.