info5901-2020sp-website

Milestone 2: Preliminary Deliverables

Deadline: Thursday 3/19, 11:59pm

Now that you’ve taken the time to understand your project and plan out how to complete it, it’s time to make substantial progress. You will complete major work on your project by producing some preliminary deliverables.

Credit & Submission

Credit: 20% of your grade. The instructor will assign your grade by coordinating with your client.

Submit all artifacts to your team’s Git repository. Markdown or PDF artifacts are preferred. Add an entry for each artifact to your repository’s table of contents. Only artifacts listed in the table of contents will be graded. Please use Markdown for all submission artifacts when possible.

Note: Failure to submit (Git push) will result in 0 points. Failure to include an artifact’s entry in the table of contents will result in a 0 for the artifact. Double check your submission!

Confidentially & Intellectual Property

Cornell’s Standard Project Agreement (CSP) protects your client’s intellectual property. You are legally obligated to meet the conditions specified in this agreement.

Many of your clients will sign the CSP using Option C: The Organization is the owner of all Intellectual Property. If your client signs with this option, you are required to sanitized any privileged information when submitting assignments.

IMPORTANT! Any work that you place in your team’s Git repository should not include any privileged or confidential information.

Expectations

In INFO 5900/5901 you are expected to work an average of 10 hours outside of class per week. At the beginning of the semester, you likely didn’t come close to putting in around 10 hours per week. However, now that initial kick-off phase is over, you’ll need to make up that effort in order to successfully complete your project on time. This means you should be spending about 12 hours per week working on this project outside of class.

Four-Box Status Report

Your team should submit a 4-Box status report every week (four-box-example.odp). Bring a paper copy to class to hand in. The instructor will review these to keep up to date on the status on your project. You should also share your 4-Box with your client.

Always be honest when reporting your status. Misrepresenting your project’s status is a considered academic misconduct.

Individual Contribution Update

Each individual team member will submit a 1 page “Individual Contribution Update” each week to report what they individually completed on the project during the previous week. Each team member should bring a paper copy of their update to class to hand in.

Each week you will submit a short summary of the following information (when applicable):

Please note that your update is what you personally worked on for the week. Do not include what your team worked on. If you collaboratively work on something, please describe the portion that you contributed. If you find yourself spending more than 30 minutes writing your update, you’re probably spending too much time on it.

Always be honest when reporting your status. Misrepresenting your project’s status is a considered academic misconduct.

Milestone Objectives

Substantial Progress

With your project plan in hand, it’s time to aggressively execute it! In Milestone 2 you should make substantial progress on your project. You should have, at a minimum, a mostly completed a preliminary deliverable or major artifact; you should be close to 40-50% done with your plan. You may still have issues with your major artifacts/deliverable, but your client should be able to see that you’ve made enough progress that you will deliver what you promised, on time by the end of the semester!

Update Plan/Schedule

No schedule is ever perfect. You should be updating your schedule each work, if not daily, to track your team’s progress. Commit each update to Git. We will check your Git history to check that you are revising this regularly.

Sometimes, you’ll run over a deadline, that’s normal. Just make sure you update the schedule to compensate for the late delivery to keep all future activities/deliverables on track to deliver at the end of the semester.

Risk Assessment & Mitigation Plan

About half-way through milestone 2, you will need to complete a risk assessment of your project. You need to assess any risks that may pull your project off it’s planned trajectory and plan how to mitigate those risks.

Planning for risks is serious business. Your risks should be actual risks and should have realistic mitigation plans. Expect to get a 0 if you don’t take this seriously and throw it together at the last minute.

Client Communication

Regular client communication is important for keeping your project on track. Surprises are bad. Regularly meet with your client, share your progress, provide status updates (4-box), and raise issues/concerns/risks.

When meeting with your client, take notes. Your meeting’s minutes should be shared with the entire team via your team’s git repository.

Client Feedback

Share a copy of your milestone 2 with your client. They need to see the progress you are making.

Milestone Submission Artifacts

All artifacts should be submitted to your team’s Git repository and should be accessible from the table of contents.

Table of Contents

Your table of contents should include:

Project Status Report

Provide a 1-2 page summary of what you completed during this milestone.

In your summary you should include an assessment of your client’s general attitude towards your project and your progress. Are they pleased? Are they concerned? etc.

You should also communicate any concerns you have about your project and progress.

Teamwork Update

Provide a brief/concise paragraph about how well your team is working together. Please tell us about any issues that you had and how you resolved them. Please also let us know if you’re having difficultly with team work and whether you might need our help.