Time/Project management
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This deliverable is designed to encourage groups to practise good time and project management practices.
You should write (and keep up-to-date as the project progresses):
– a list of defined milestones, including the dependencies that each milestone has, which team member is responsible for leading it, and the completion status of each,
– a week-by-week view of planned effort (hours to be spent) going into the project (taking into account other deadlines that you expect to have from other courses), and
– a log of actual effort spent on each milestone (including an assessment of whether the estimates were optimistic or pessimistic, and whether you need to reduce the scope of certain deliverables).
This tracking system is very ad-hoc and simple. However, it contains the key data and models the main activities of many commercial tools used in software development such as JIRA, Asana, Fogbugz, Trello, and so on. If you have already used such a system, and your team would prefer to use it, then that’s fine.
You may also find it helpful to use GitHub issues as part of your project management flow.
The expectation is that you will update the project plan on at least a weekly basis. You do not need to update the information at a very fine granularity — updating the information should take only a minute, and does not need to be done for every commit.
Assessment
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The main goal of this component is to get you to do some time and project management, so you need to build up evidence that you did it. You don’t need to do the project management particularly *well* — the main thing is that you *do* it! The assessment will be in a 20 minute oral session per team in Summer term, where the team spends 10 minutes explaining the milestones, and how things were managed. The only thing needed for the oral will be the submitted repository (no presentation or other preparation is needed). The remaining 10 minutes will be feedback on the submitted compiler deliverable.
Levels of achievement are:
– A: demonstrated good understanding of how to plan and track progress, and showed good practices in terms of managing milestones and time. Outcomes from effort spent are clear.
– B: updated progress each week, with acceptable granularity in terms of time spent and milestone planning. Most effort has a clear outcome.
– C: progress not updated regularly, and weak link between effort spent and achieved outcomes.
– D: sporadic time management, with files updated well after effort was expended.