Old News: CIS 422/522, Software Methodology

Old News

28 Sep 2005: I have assigned groups and sent email. If you turned in a questionnaire, you should have received an email listing your group members. I will talk about group roles and teamwork in class Thursday; for now it is a good idea to meet to get acquainted and "size up" the problem.

Curious why I threw you together into a group? Here's roughly how it worked. First, I decided to go with 4 groups of 5 (and one of 6) rather than 5 groups of 4. This is largely "fault tolerance": If one group member drops the course or flakes out, you should be able to recover. You can probably even recover if you lose two, but it would be tough (definitely talk with me about strategies if you lose a member or two). Then I tried to make sure each group had various kinds of talent that might prove useful ... at least one person who knows a scripting language like Perl or Python, at least one person who is familiar with web PHP or JSP, at least one person who got an A in 313 and/or 315, and what looked like a reasonable mix of what you perceived to be your strong and weak skills.

I am sure I did not do this perfectly ... I never do, and I'm not sure it's possible in a short time and with limited information. If you note a serious problem in your team makeup, please bring it to my attention right away; the longer we wait, the harder it is for me to make adjustments (and the more annoying it is to the team that I have to steal someone from). My overall impression is that, given the large team size, each team is pretty strong.

In fact these are really big teams for such a small project; you're very unlikely to have this many people working on a small project in industry or a research group. This may be helpful to you in spreading around the work, in addition to the "fault tolerance" mentioned above. On the other hand, it will be a challenge to coordinate and manage.

27 Sep 2005: We have selected the MIME separator project as project 1. There was a fair amount of support for both candidates, but significantly more people favored the MIME separator, and significantly more disliked the other.

Some important points about the project came up in the discussion of the two projects:

• You may need to choose a programming language compatible with the libraries you want to use. As far as we know, Java libraries do not provide support for parsing Unix mailbox (mbox) format. Python? Perl? C?
• The learning curve may be significant, which is a risk in such a short project. In addition to reading Joel regarding specs and schedules, I suggest a little research on what is available, both in software and documentation. The original MIME specification published as an Internet RFC by Nathaniel Borenstein (author of Writing Software as if People Mattered, a book I recommend) is one of the best specification documents I have read, but it's long ... I don't think you can afford to understand the whole thing given your schedule. What you need is to learn just enough about MIME to do the job. Can you find some good documentation that suffices for that purpose?

I am putting together teams now, based on the questionnaires you filled out. If for some reason you did not make it to class today, but are still planning to take the course this term, contact me ASAP so that I have a chance of placing you with a team.

Volcanology 307 is on the top floor of Volcanology, which is across 13th from EMU, between Columbia and Willamette.

I doubt the room is handicap accessible, because of the stairs. If this is a problem for you, please contact me as soon as possible so that I can request an accessible room.

There are two candidates for the first project --- look at them now because we will make a selection in class on Tuesday the 27th.

See notes on the schedule below --- the first project will effectively be 3.5 weeks, and the second project 4.5 weeks, even tighter than usual. It will be really important to plan carefully, trim features mercilessly, and hit the ground running. The good news is that you will be done with the projects (except for demos and grading) by Thanksgiving, and have a bit more breathing room than usual to recover, finish your other course work, and prepare for exams.

Last edit: Thu, 6 October, 2005 / Version identifier: $Id: oldnews.html,v 1.1 2005/10/06 21:01:24 michal Exp $