Project Milestone 0: Charter

Due: Friday, February 4, 10:00 pm through CMS.

Make sure to read the project overview as you begin working on this milestone.

Your charter defines the members of your group and proposes the software system you intend to build. Your charter should include the following information:

The name of your group.

You are committing to this name for the whole semester. You might consider picking something clever. (But not too clever—you might want to demo your system for future employers.)

A working name for your system.

You are not committed to this name; it may evolve throughout the semester.

Whether you want to use this project as your MEng degree project.

Most groups will not want to do this. Review the MEng project requirements to help you decide.

The members of your group and their contact information.

Your group must have four to six members. We need to know the names, netids, and email addresses of your group members. For your own internal communication, you might consider including mobile phone numbers, IM names, etc. We strongly recommend that you establish an archived email list for group communication; Google or Yahoo groups are possibilities.

The manager of your group.

This person is responsible for all logistics of the project: organizing the group and its tasks, ensuring everything is on schedule, submitting any deliverables, and managing communication within your team and with the course staff. A good project manager keeps things running smoothly and avoids surprises. If you need to change managers later in the semester, that's fine. (But it shouldn't be a rotating position.) The manager role is not your only opportunity for leadership: in later milestones, you will assign important roles to the remaining members of your group.

Your weekly status meeting.

As a group, you should agree on a weekly, hour-long meeting time and place (outside of class) that you can all attend to discuss the status of your project. Note that you will almost certainly need to meet more frequently than this, but at a minimum you'll want to have this slot available. In rare cases, the course staff might want to attend one of your meetings. So we ask that your meeting be scheduled between 8 am and 8 pm, on a weekday, on central campus (preferably the Engineering quad).

A proposal for your system.

Summarize the system you intend to build. You should regard this summary as a starting point; you will have the chance to elaborate in future milestones. Here, you should answer the following questions:

• What is the problem to be addressed?
• Why is this problem worth solving? (What makes it hard, interesting, or challenging?)
• What will be the most important features of this system?

Your summary should be brief—only one or two paragraphs. However, it should include more detail than the very terse system ideas given in the project overview.

Submission

Form a CMS group containing the four to six members of your project group. We strongly recommend that you do this at least two days before the milestone deadline, because the CMS group formation process can take some time to complete.

After your CMS group is formed, you should submit a single file containing all of the information above. We prefer PDF but will also accept text or Word files. You need to submit this file only once for the entire group.