External project requirements

This semester we are not allowing “greenfield” projects; your project must involve enhancing a pre-existing system. Here are a few constraints to keep in mind:

• The project must be worked on exclusively by a team of 6-8 students currently enrolled in CS 5150 (closely consulting with the client, of course).
  • Other parties may certainly contribute to the same codebase throughout the semester (this is realistic), but development that falls under the scope of the “project” must be managed and performed by a CS 5150 team.
• The client must commit to regular meetings with the development team (at least once per 3-week session; weekly is even better). They should understand their “client role” (they know what they want and can say whether or not they’re getting it).
  • You may not be your own client. Nor may your client have a conflict of interest that could compromise the fair assessment of anyone on the team (no significant others, no other CS 5150 students, etc.)
• The task must involve adding new capabilities to an existing system of moderate complexity. How many authors have contributed to the existing code, and roughly how many lines of backend and test code already exist?
  • If the project involves building a new service to interact with others in a system, a better metric might be the number of services you’ll need to interface with and the size of their APIs.
  • As a rule of thumb, the existing code/context should be several times larger than what your project proposes to add.
• The existing system should have tests that can be run in an automated way (or else you will need to add such a testing capability and include that in your project scope).
• In most cases, projects should involve a user interface component and some persistent state. (Writing a function library would not make a good project for the purposes of this class.)
• The basic requirements of the project should be known (informally) ahead of time. Conducting research and inventing new algorithms are to be avoided—these tasks are very difficult to estimate and can block the whole project.
• The course staff must have permission to view the source code, and teams must contribute to the code via a version control system (Git is strongly preferred).

See the old Spring 2020 course website for tips regarding projects and clients. But remember that this semester’s policies take precedence.