In this assignment, you are asked to interview a professional software engineer to gain insight into “a day in the life” of a software developer.
Prof. Anderson recently reached out to the local Boulder/Denver tech community asking for volunteers to make themselves available to be interviewed by members of this class. Almost 50 developers—representing 10 different companies—responded and signed up to be interviewed!
Prof. Anderson will soon make a link to a Google Doc containing the contact info for these developers. Students in this class (either individually or in a team) will use that Google Doc to reserve the right to one of the developers and will then make arrangements to interview that developer. You may conduct the interview face-to-face, over the phone, or via video conference. You will have ~10 days to contact the developer, find a time for the interview, conduct the interview, and generate the report of the interview.
The goal of your 20-30 minute interview is to gain insight into the types of software this developer creates for his/her organization, the role of the developer in that organization, the tools they use to do their work, the life cycles that the follow to organize their work, and the challenges/problems that they encounter as they work on their software development projects. If you have solid answers to these questions and you have time remaining, then you can also ask the developer about their personal story—how did they get into software development, for instance—and where they see the field of software development going.
The report that you submit should NOT be a word-for-word transcript of the interview. It should instead identify the questions you asked and present a summary of the response to each question. You will submit the report as an HTML document, using the template linked below.
This assignment is worth 50 points.
Please upload a copy of your report for this assignment to D2L before the start of Lecture 6 on Thursday, September 11th.
If you have any questions, ask them at the start of lecture or send Prof. Anderson an e-mail message.
You can download the template you should use for your submission by right clicking on the link below and telling your browser to download the link to disk rather than displaying it in your browser. You can also click on the link, let it load, and then select Save As… and save the resulting HTML document to your desktop.