Winter Quarter, 2000
Lecture: TTh 2:00 - 3:20
Location: PSCB 120
(Need directions to campus? See
the maps directory.
Course code:
36158
Lab Session: MW 3:30 - 4:50
Location: ET202 (not really!)
Students work in teams to specify, design, construct, test, and document a complete software system in a specialized application domain using application/domain-specific techniques. Each offering's topic is announced the preceding spring.
This course will emphasize techniques and notations essential to creating software systems for which there was not adequate time or opportunity in ICS 125 or 126A. A variety of advanced techniques are discussed, depending on the particular applications targeted.
All students are expected to attend all lecture sections. In general, there will not be much lecturing in the class. Instead, class time will be highly interactive, and all students are expected to participate. About half of the time will be spent performing reviews of the artifacts developed. These reviews will take up all lecture and discussion periods the week following the due date for each deliverable.
Yes! The discussion section is essential: You will need to meet with your teammates REGULARLY. EVERYONE needs to be in attendance at team meetings. The discussion section time period is the guaranteed time period for you team to meet.
We'll decide this the first week of classes. Some candidates:
Same as ICS 125, and for the same reasons: Since ICS 127 has a strong team project orientation, it is essential that the drop/add process be terminated early. Therefore NO drops or adds will be permitted after the end of the SECOND week of class.
Topics will depend upon the interests of the students and the projects chosen. The following list is representative of the topics that might be discussed in class.
None required.
The project is the focus of this course and will be assessed accordingly. It will account for 80% of your grade; this is broken down between deliverables, a team Web page, and presentations. The remaining 20% will be divided among individual course logs, teamwork, individual leadership demonstrated, and the final.
| Deliverable | Weight | Description | Due Date |
| Individual Web Page | . | . | 14 January |
|
. | . | 18 January |
|
. | . | 20 January |
| Team Web Page | . | . | 21 January |
| Prospectus and Plan |
|
Prospectus | 25 January |
|
. | week 3 | 25 January |
| Requirements Specification |
|
Requirements | 1 February |
|
. | week 4 | 1 February |
| Architecture/Module Specifications |
|
Architecture/Design | 15 February |
|
. | week 6 | 15 February |
| Implementation |
|
Implementation | 29 February |
|
. | week 8 | 29 February |
| Testing/Test Documentation |
|
Integration/Testing | 14 March |
|
. | week 10 | 16 March |
The deliverables are weighted according to the relative amount of time and effort we expect you will spend on each (and not necessarily on their importance with respect to software development). Variations to this may be made to accommodate the particular needs of a given project or a given team. Also, note that the grade for a deliverable will consist not only of the document/specification, developed during that phase but also the test plan developed along side it as well as the review conducted in class.
Deliverables are due at 12:50 PM on the date indicated in the table above. NO LATE ASSIGNMENTS WILL BE ACCEPTED. This applies to your final system and all intermediate projects. Since you are working in this class as part of team, it is the team's responsibility to ensure that assignments are turned in on time. Normal excuses for late assignments, such as illness, do not apply in a team setting (unless of course everyone on the team is ill :-)
Unless directed otherwise, deliverables must be turned in directly to the instructor or placed in the instructors's mailbox before that time.
Your customer should be invited to your team's Prospectus and Requirements review as well as your demonstration (and, possibly even your design and code reviews depending on the nature of your customer). The review is your team's chance to inform as well as obtain feedback and ideas from all relevant parties; your document will be reviewed at this time by course staff and clients as well as the rest of the class. This review is a formality, however, and each team should have presented and negotiated both relevant documents to the customer prior to the review (if you haven't, it may be unpleasantly obvious by the interactions at this time).
All the documents associated with the above listed phases are integral parts of systematic software development. Their continued, up-to-date existence is necessary for successful system development. Do not delete documents after they have been turned in. They must reside permanently on your team's website.
All deliverable documents must be prepared on-line and be available as part of your project home page either as either HTML or .pdf files. NO MS Word files. In general, the following should be observed.
For all deliverables, except for the last, you will also have the opportunity to ``fix it'' based on its evaluation. You may hand in an improved version of a deliverable one week after that deliverable has been graded and receive up to 50% of the points deducted on the initial version. The purpose of this exercise is for you to both learn how to use the techniques and so that you do not implement something from a bad design or specification. You should keep the same responsibilities for the improvement phase but assign new responsibilities for the next phase.
Throughout this course, just as in ICS 125, you will keep a course log recording the time you spend on all activities related to this course. At the beginning of each week you must email the previous week's log to the instructor. A sheet showing what should be on the log is available at: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~taylor/ics125_fq99/logform.html .
Keep a copy of your logs: you will need them at the end of the quarter for the final review.
Each entry records the date and amount of time spent, type of entry, and text describing the entry. An entry is one of three types:
Most entries will be of the first type, but occasionally you should reflect and think about what is going on. The time entry applies for descriptions of activities and records the amount of time spent in hours, to the nearest quarter hour.
You will be marked down only for failing to email logs each week, giving too little detail, or failing to keep track of time spent.
You are especially encouraged to keep track of the kinds of errors you make and the amount of time they consume. The purpose of recording these errors is so that you develop a better understanding of the kinds of mistakes you typically make. With that understanding you can improve your performance in the future, by paying extra attention to those areas in which you've had problems in the past.
At the end of the term project you will be asked to divide 100 points among the members of your project team, corresponding to how you believe they contributed to the project as a whole (or on a phase-by-phase basis if you wish). In addition, each team member will be appraised for each phase. This ``peer apportionment of credit'' will be used to help determine appropriate individual grades for the project component.
You are strongly advised to consult weekly with the instructor/TA about your progress, problems, questions, etc.
Meetings are an important part of a team project. A successful meeting requires that the meeting have a definite purpose and associated agenda (these are the responsibility of the phase manager) and that all decisions be recorded in minutes (the responsibility of the phase clerical person).
The purpose of minutes is to record decisions made and to be available for updating any team member who misses a meeting. Each deliverable must be accompanied by agendas and minutes for the team meetings held during the associated period of time. I.e., keep the agenda, and the minutes, on-line as part of your project web page. The minutes should outline
As noted earlier, teams will use (at least) the discussion sections for team meetings.
Team Designator
|
Home page
| Customer Contact
| Office
| |
| TBD | TBD | TBD | TBD |
The primary computing facilities will be the ICS Labs, which provide Sun Solaris and Windows/NT machines. The hardware environment and software environment is posted on the lab's web site as well as the lab hours and availability for Fall 1999.
The system specification for each deliverable may be done on Suns, Macintoshes, PCs, or any other available platform. Choice of computing platform for implementation will depend on the projects chosen. Where possible and reasonable, Java will be the implementation language used. (Scads of Java information is available on-line, including a tutorial, reference material and many, many packages, such as those available from Gamelan.)
Choice of computing platforms will depend on the projects chosen. Where possible and reasonable Java will be the implementation language used.
You are also bound by all policies posted at I CS's Computing Support Policies, including ICS's Ethical Use of Computing Policy, as well as UCI's Computer Use Policy.