CSCI 6448

CSCI 6448 is a project-based course. The class will be divided into teams of four to five students each and will construct a complete object-oriented analysis and design of a software system. A complete design will consist of a requirements overview, a set of use cases and their associated features, a set of class diagrams, a set of activity diagrams, a set of interaction diagrams, and a set of state diagrams. An initial mapping of the design into an implementation is required but the produced system does not have to be "feature complete". Instead, the focus of the class will be on creating a design that communicates the structure and behavior of the system in a clean and clear fashion.

As a result, the majority of a student's grade will be based on the completion of the project. The project is worth 70 percent of your grade and the internal breakdown is:

Just to anticipate some potential questions, assignments will be typically due at the beginning of class on Thursday (when assigned), unless you are submitting it electronically. In that case, the notification of the location of the completed assignment (e.g. its URL) must reach me before class on Thursday morning. Acceptable formats include nicely formatted laser-printed documents, postscript, or PDF. If you want to turn in hand-drawn diagrams, you should come see me near the beginning of the semester with an example of your work. The diagrams must be clear and legible to be acceptable. It is hoped that with four to five person teams the task of generating the diagrams on a computer can be distributed such that it becomes managable.

The remaining 30 percent of the grade is broken down as follows:

Class Participation is my chance to grade your contribution to the class based on a variety of factors: comments in class, a presentation, posts to our newsgroup, etc. It should be fairly easy to do well here!

The Group Evaluation requirement is one where the team members get a chance to evaluate the performance of their other team members. I will take the weighted average of each team member's evaluation of a particular student to compute this grade. It is hoped that this will provide a small incentive to keep your teammates happy!

Reading Critiques: Occasionally I will assign a paper for the class to read for discussion in lecture. In each instance, you will need to write a one page critique of the paper including a summary of the paper's main points and your reaction to them. These summaries will be due under my office door by midnight on the following Sunday (i.e. paper assigned tuesday, critques due Sunday night).

Note: The assessment criteria for the class may change over the course of the Semester. This system is simply my first pass in order to convey my thoughts about the process to you. As we go through the semester, I will be willing to make small modifications to ensure that the class understands what is required of them.