Grading will be based on the following:
- Software engineering and professional development practices
- Interface design, advanced library support
- Techniques for team-oriented design and development
- Testing and test-driven development
- Software reliability and robustness
- Students present and demonstrate final projects
Grading experiments
Whether the experiment “succeeds” or “fails” is irrelevant to your grade. Your experiments will be graded by the following criteria:
- Hypothesis - How clearly stated is your hypothesis? Does it have an explicit, meaningful success outcome and way to measure the outcome?
- Approach - Have you defined a concrete, meaningful change in approach? Is it narrow yet interesting? If you change too many variables, it is hard to evaluate the results. But if the experiment is obvious or not a large deviation, it is hard to evaluate the result.
- Comparison to literature - describe any existing approaches that your experiment relates to. Is this something new that your team came up with? If so, how does it compare to other approaches which are popular in professional software development? If you are drawing from the materials presented in the lectures, this part becomes a lot easier! But if you choose to draw from other material for your experiment concept, your team will need to describe the content and how your idea compares to the relevant material (blog posts, articles, book chapters). Cite one or two sources.
Course Topics
Experiments can be drawn from lecture modules. Course lectures may include:
- Small slicing
- Emergent design
- Refactoring
- Pair/mob programming
- Retrospectives, turn up the good, facilitation techniques
- MVPs
What you may choose to do or not to in the class:
- Pair/mob programming
Things you must do in this course (there will be graded exercises)
- Story mapping
- MVP (students will submit an MVP)
- TDD
Things that are built into the grading rubric
- Delivering working software in small increments (there will be intermittent deadlines where you must have something working)
- Inspect & adapt (retrospectives & experiments)
Final Project Rubric
Students present and demonstrate final projects
What you are graded on here:
- Having a working product
- Can someone achieve a meaningful outcome by using your product? Not an exciting one, but a usable one.
What you won’t get credit for
- A partially working product
- Having an ambitious, super innovative product