COMP4050 applies an agile method to the engineering of features in a non-trivial software project. Students work as a team on a project, in cooperation with other teams.  The assessment is focused on the software processes and tools that a team uses, as well as individual contributions to the team effort. 

Development Process

The artifacts contributing to the assessment of the development process include individual and project logs files, project boards, student logs, peer evaluation, retrospectives, and presentations. Based on the supplied evidence and the convenor's observations, these assessment items will be assessed according to the following standards:

• Distinction/High Distinction: An extremely valuable team member who makes many key contributions to many different aspects of the software that is developed by the team.
• Credit: A team member who makes useful contributions to multiple aspects of the team's software.
• Pass: A team member who makes a small number of contributions to the team's software or focuses on a single area of contribution. 

Software Product

The artifacts contributing to the assessment of the software product include user feedback of the final product, plus artifacts collected over the course of the project, such as logs, test records, requirements documents, architecture descriptions, and the actual code base. Based on the supplied evidence and the convenor's observations, these assessment items will be assessed according to the following standards:

• Distinction/High Distinction: The software product is of high quality, demonstrating excellent functionality, usability, and robustness. It meets or exceeds user expectations and project requirements, with clear evidence of thoughtful design, and thorough testing. The product reflects strong collaboration across teams and integration of individual contributions.

• Credit: The software product is functional and meets most project requirements. It shows evidence of solid design and implementation, with attention to usability and testing. While not exceptional, the product is reliable and demonstrates competent teamwork and integration of contributions.

• Pass: The software product meets basic functionality and some project requirements. It may have limited usability, design, or testing coverage. The product may reflect uneven contributions or limited collaboration.

Individual Reflective Report

Students will be asked to reflect and provide evidence on their progression with respect to general skills such as Autonomy, Influence, Complexity, and Knowledge. At the end of the session, they are asked to reflect in addition on their development in a specific technical skill. The report should include and refer to curated artifacts such as personal logs, team logs, and project management resources. Based on the supplied evidence and the convenor's observations, these assessment items will be assessed according to the following standards:

• Distinction/High Distinction: The reflection demonstrates insight in the development across all general skill areas, as well as the selected technical skill. The reflection clearly identifies challenges, learning moments, and strategies for improvement, and explicitly refers to attached evidence and artefacts.

• Credit: The reflection shows a solid understanding of personal development across most general skill areas,  and the selected technical skill. the reflection provides relevant examples. 

• Pass: The reflection provides a basic overview of personal development, but lacks a systematic approach to discussing the general skill areas, or the selected technical skill.

Requirements to pass the unit

• Achieve a total mark equal to or greater than 50%.

Late Assessment Submission Penalty 

Unless a Special Consideration request has been submitted and approved, a 5% penalty (of the total possible mark) will be applied each day the final reflection is not submitted, up until the 7th day (including weekends). After the 7th day, a mark of '0' will be awarded even if the assessment is submitted. For example, if the assignment is worth 8 marks (of the entire unit) and your submission is late by 19 hours (or 23 hours 59 minutes 59 seconds), 0.4 marks (5% of 8 marks) will be deducted. If your submission is late by 24 hours (or 47 hours 59 minutes 59 seconds), 0.8 marks (10% of 8 marks) will be deducted, and so on. 

Submission time is set at Sundays, 11:55 pm. A 1-hour grace period is provided to students who experience technical problems.

Special Consideration

The Special Consideration Policy aims to support students impacted by short-term circumstances or events that are serious, unavoidable, and significantly disruptive, which may affect their performance in assessments. If you experience circumstances or events that affect your ability to complete the assessments in this unit on time, please inform the convenor and submit a Special Consideration request through ask.mq.edu.au.

Week 1

The workshops will start in week 1.

Weekly Activities

• Workshop including lecture (3 hours)

Workshops

The focus of the unit is on development periods of a few weeks duration - so-called sprints - where milestones such as new features, bug fixes and the like are proposed, planned, delivered and reviewed. Students should not develop code by themselves or in pairs or focus narrowly on one or two aspects. Instead, we expect students to participate in each aspect of the project rather than focus on one or two aspects in isolation. In particular, students will be asked to review each other's code and participate in reviews of each software milestone.

Tools such as distributed version control and milestone planning software will be used throughout to coordinate activities.

Each week there is a three-hour class during which the teams will meet to discuss expectations, plans and progress. Usually, the first hour or so will be devoted to general topics of interest to the whole class, while the second and third hours will be used by teams to work together on their activities. Students are expected to attend all classes since they are vital meetings of the software team.

Methods of Communication

We will communicate with you during the weekly sessions, via your university email and through announcements on iLearn. Queries to convenors can either be made during the weekly meeting, placed on the iLearn discussion board or sent to the unit convenor via the contact email on iLearn.

The schedule is tentative, and may be subject to changes if circumstance requires.

We value student feedback to be able to continually improve the way we offer our units. As such we encourage students to provide constructive feedback via student surveys, to the teaching staff directly, or via the FSE Student Experience & Feedback link in the iLearn page.   In response to feedback we received from student after the previous offering, this unit will focus during the semester on formative feedback, allowing the team and individual students to demonstrate that they can continually improve processes and performance.

As part of the faculty's effort to standardize the assessment portfolio, the previous assessments have been replaced by three assessments that all refer to a specific deliverable. Unchanged is that we will provide formative feedback throughout the unit to prepare for the summative assessments.