| COURSE CHRONOLOGY |
2025-02-16 Addiing a few more details to the release of project info yesterday. The problem statements page is always linked from our dashboard but is indeed updated for present semester. Same for details of deliverables and timing: these are contained in our timeline doc. (Yes, a textwall but all the detail is in one place there.) We will surely discuss in class Tuesday how to get started, but remember, we practiced team start up in the small with our scrimmages. Teams that revert to generic practices which are accepted in prior classes can anticipate the generic outcomes too. How about trying the stuff we have been teaching? And ... an important tip from an old guy who has done this before: There is no more important time to gain ground fast than at start of a project. This is a time when we know the least about risks, objectives and for that matter each other. The early steps set our velocity for the entire project since our expectations for interaction rock up pretty quickly. This is definitely the time to apply principles and respect the fundamental economic basis for our field. We will want to see a team charter pushed to the project folder 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 intermediate 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. |
2025-02-15 And it is a whole new ballgame! Class project tasking is up. Check out the info in your personal folder. This will tell you the project name and give a link in the repo for it as well. Once I recycle the VMs I will issue fresh images so the teams have a shared host to work with too, and its name etc will appear in that team folder as well. The ticket obligation starts now. No task in the project is complete until it is logged in the mentors site. (Do it now, not save it for later, per discussion in lab.) The mentoring opportunity is now in effect. Each week before 5PM Friday offer your team members tips, praise and advice on how to up their game - also as discussed in lab. |
2025-02-14 (Evening) Scrimmage 3 is a wrap. Be sure to get your team reviews entered on the mentors site as soon as possible. Meanwhile, my marathon grading and tasking session begins. |
2025-02-14 (Noon) Everything has remained stable throughout the morning and I have the mentors server (vale) back up. All is right with the world? Fingers crossed. Keep focus on scrimmage 3, all systems seem go! |
2025-02-14 (7:00AM) Just a quick status report. The VMs seemed to have remained stable over night. We have not seen any more peak load that had in effect DOS'd the server from overwhelming stream of IO requests. We are not the only users on that server and a number of others were impacted so I have been attending to those needs over night, but one VM I overlooked was our mentors site. I'll be turning attention to that this morning so we can get back to the reviews too. Will post the status here when I know more. I would not rule out a server restart later today, again hopefully only a brief interruption, so generally let's take this as a great reminder of why we save our work and keep a record of installation/configuration steps that make the difference between annoying interruption and catastrophic loss of service. |
2025-02-13 (8:30PM) All VMs should be back up, to different degrees of "up", following the interruption due to a load fault on the VM server. Blend a bunch of teams in an apocalyptic hackathon all at once, with a massive number of VS plug-ins hammering for service simultaneously and then trigger some heavy system updates and you have a recipe for load average going through the roof. As that happened most images suffered, and a few suffered disk issues which were not recoverable. Those teams have a fresh starting point (and notification accordingly). Let me know of further issues as you see them. |
2025-02-13 Discussion today on principles of software engineering that we will practice applying on the projects through rest of the semester. |
2025-02-11 Since we are on the topic of planning, remember that teams can be practicing construction of a rubric by which they think their projects should be judged. You aren't just cut-pasting my rubric but instead trying to anticipate what will bring a customer to success. Later of course we can compare. Did we match criteria in scrimmage 2? I released my notes on those scoring sheets. What are your criteria for scrimmage 3? Frame that as part of your updated plan and let's see after Friday if we are starting to get on the same page with expectations. |
2025-02-11 Class today will be virtual in order to adapt to the campus partial closure. Check out the class repo where you'll find the zoom link to use. Join using your campus credentials (directory ID) so we can bring you in from the waiting room. I will swap the format of the week, doing lab today (we will go over those plans in a retrospective, as promised) and practice having a professional virtual meeting (which means cameras on and be ready to participate.) We will save continued discussion about principles for Thursday when we hope to be back in person. |
2025-02-10 Let's see those 400-level course surveys, please. Only about one third responding to date. It is something I find useful in tasking class projects, however, so please don't let me fly blind. |
2025-02-10 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 also let me 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 very 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. |
2025-02-10 Everyone seems to be eyeing the weather report wondering about snow, so just to confirm our practices: If the campus closes for some reason then that is relief from coming to class, not work. Count blessings that you have that much more time to work on projects. (Insert smilie here.) If we go with an on-line class to keep things going then we will post accordingly, so (as usual) just track the traffic here and never panic without appropriate instructions to do so. |
2025-02-07 Scrimmage 1 scores entered. |
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.
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:
|
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:
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.
|