• What you did on Group Exercise 1.
• Your main individual achievements on Group Exercise 1.
• Individual problems encountered during group exercise and how they were handled.
• What was learned about:

  • Software Project Management
  • Requirements Capture, Specification and Validation
  • Working in a Group

The report should be no longer than 5 pages (not including supporting diagrams and figures). You may use any document preparation system you like, although you are encouraged to use LaTeX.

Be careful to:

• Organise your report clearly, using appropriate sections, subsections and paragraphs. Use a legible format.
• Write clearly and grammatically.
• Give your report a coherent structure based on the content outline above. It should be easy for a reader to find your comments on each of the topics or subtopics mentioned above.
• Keep to the 5 page limit
• Back up general statements with detailed, concrete and relevant evidence from your experience on the exercise.
• Relate your comments, where appropriate, to the material presented on the course or in the course textbooks or in related reference materials.

Assessment Criteria

Your report will be assessed on these criteria:

• Quality of presentation (organisation, writing, appearance).
• Quality of coverage of the assigned topics.
• Quantity, relevance and insight of the points made.
• Use of evidence to support claims, particularly detailed concrete examples from experience on the exercise.
• Well-references links to course material and other relevant sources (e.g., other texts, articles, websites).

Each of the 5 criteria will be marked in bands. The criteria for award of marks is as shown in the table below. The overall average aggregate score will be converted to a proportion of 12.5 to award the contribution to the overall PSD3 mark.

Thus, example 1 below would be considered to be at grade A, while example 2 would be a D for quality of points made, evidence, and for links to course material.

Example 1: In week 3 of the semester, we made a decision to use SVN as our configuration management system because it was the only system with which we were familiar (via PSD workshop 3). We defined a set of policies for change control under SVN which were specified in our project management plan (see lecture 7, slides 10-13). A key part of this plan was the requirement that, before starting work on a deliverable, a team member must make a formal request to change that deliverable and receive approval from the team leader. Mr Gray checked this plan and suggested that we make the process more "lightweight". As a result we modified the policy so that a team member need only email the team whenever they were about to add new material to an existing deliverable. This worked well; most team members complied with the policy, while the previous policy was never followed by anyone. In addition, we found that this informal monitoring scheme helped us to avoid duplication of effort. For example, James mistakenly believed he should add the Use Case Descriptions to the Requirements Specification, but discovered his error when he received a message from Tom saying that Tom was about to do it; James checked the project plan and discovered his mistake before wasting any effort. However, in our change control plan, we failed to identify who should be responsible for production of each deliverable, as discussed by Sommerville (section 2.9.1, 8th edition) and also by McNabb ("Who Does What?", http://www.somewhere.ac.uk/mcnabb/revision.html, accessed: 25/12/07). This oversight turned out to have serious consequences; one deliverable, the project log, was never produced because no-one was in charge of it.

Example 2: During the exercise we found it useful to employ a revision control system.

At the end of the individual report, include an assessment of each member of your group, including yourself Give full names of group members, please!

You will carry out two assessments, one for quality of work and one for effort expended. For each assessment, you have a total of N X 20 points, where N is the number of members of your team (i.e., you have 20 points per team member). Allocate this total as you wish to the members of your team such that the total number of points awarded adds up to the total available.

• Quality of Work
• Effort

If there is a large difference in point allocation then give a brief justification for the outlier(s). This information will be used to determine the potential award of a positive or negative delta to each student’s overall mark, if appropriate.

The peer assessment does not count towards the five page limit.