A. Hornof - April 27, 2020
This document summarizes how to submit group projects and group project documents for CIS 422 Software Methodologies.
You should do all of the following one day before the deadline.
1. Every group member should carefully read the "solicitation". In this class the solicitation includes the section on "Good Writing" in the syllabus and any project documents or grading criteria that were distributed. Group members should work together to make sure that everything submitted meet requirements and is "responsive to the solicitation". This pre-evaluation of the submission is a form of validation and verification.
2. Go through and add identifying information to all of the artifacts: Make sure that every document, source code file, README.txt, and every other artifact (thing) that you submit has, at the top of the file, a statement of what that artifact is, the names of all authors (alphabetical by last name), the group name, and the date that the artifact was created or last modified. It should be immediately clear what each thing is, who created it, and when.
3. Gather all of the computer files that you will be submitting. Submit all of the source code and project files. Do not submit instructions that require your source code or project files to do be downloaded.
5. You may submit fewer than seven documents if you combine some together, such as the Programmer's Documentation and Installation Instructions. But if you do, it would be good to add a useful table of contents. Some instructions for specific documents are in some of the following steps.
The next few steps provide some instructions for specific documents that you should be submitting.
6. Do not submit diagrams, figures, project timelines, or other content as stand-alone files. Either insert these elements into word processing documents, or convert them into PDFs and integrate them into one of the seven required documents. Do not submit Microsoft Word files. Save them as PDF. All documents intended to convey information to a human should be in .PDF or .txt format.
7. When you are adding figures to word processing documents, make sure that the text in the figures, and the figures on the page, are large enough so that the text in the figure is roughly the same size as the text in the main body of the document.
8. Excel files, such as used for time-tracking and task-tracking should be printed to PDF after formatted the document so that data are visible in a useful manner from page to page, such as with all of the columns for a task on the same page. You can make the margins small (such as 0.25 inches) to get more on each page. Sometimes a landscape orientation is better for Excel documents. If it permits the best presentation of information, it is fine to mix landscape-orientation and portrait-orientation pages in the same document.
9. Add page numbers to all word processing files.
10. Organize all project files in a directory structure.
12. Create a single <group_name>.zip file of the project directory, such as "Group1.zip". If the entire submission is just a single PDF (and if Canvas is set up to accept PDF files) you can create a single <group_name>.pdf file and submit that.
13. One group member should submit the project on Canvas, ideally one day before the deadline. At the time of submission, that student should also make that file available to all of the other students in the group. If more than one group member submits for the same project deadline, any one of the submissions will be arbitrarily chosen for evaluation, and the other submissions may be ignored.
14. Only the final submission will be evaluated. Any previous submissions will be ignored.
15. All students in the group should now evaluate the exact product that was submitted. This includes reading every document, comparing them against the solicitation (see Step 1 above). If source code was submitted, every student in the group should take the submitted .zip file to a computer that was not used to develop the project, and try to (a) install the project using exactly the instructions that were submitted and (b) use the system in exactly the manner that it is intended to be used in the real world.