As part of your introduction to current practice in Software Engineering, you will form a programming team to build a somewhat large and open-ended software system. We will use this project as an opportunity to apply the techniques covered in the class.

The Teams

We will divide you into project teams early in the course and will meet with you each Friday starting the second week of class (lab #2). Your team will be largely self-organizing; we will meet with you as “customers” or “advocates” but will expect you to make good use of your time (and ours) by focusing on the project and making demonstrable progress each week.

Be flexible and patient and to do your fair share of the team's work. At the end of the semester, we will assign a project grade to the team as a whole, but will then adjust each individual score based on our own observations and on confidential comments each of you make concerning the relative work done by each team member. We will ask you for these comments throughout the semester.

The Project and Development Environment

The project for this course will implement the following components:

• Mobile Client — a portable, client application (for the React Native ecosystem)
• Web Service — a RESTFul web service (built using NodeJS on Heroku) for a relational database (built using SQL)

All of the defaults tools listed above are installed and running on the Windows partition of the lab. We are willing to consider alternate platforms that implement the same architectural elements, but you must have a compelling reason to switch and we may not be able to provide as much support.

Each team will choose its own project. Here are some suggestions:

• A social media app designed to develop and build communities.
• A mobile app for an existing web application
• An app of use for your internship/job employer.

You’ll note that there isn’t much of a specification here; coming up with the project idea is part of software development process — a pretty important part, actually.

Project Management

As you are developing your system, your development and management tools will maintain records of the nature and amount of the work you do, including:

• Tasks — your team’s status on each of its tasks, both short-term and long-term
• Time — the number of hours each team member spends performing tasks
• Code — a shared repository (or repositories) of all your project code

You’ll develop the project using an iterative and incremental process with three-week time-boxed iterations that produces the deliverables specified on the course schedule. These deliverables will be published your project deliverables as demonstrated on the sample GitHub master project.

SE Hall of Fame

Some of the group projects over the years have lived beyond the class, and have thus earned a place in the Calvin Software Engineering Hall of Fame.