M&IS 44044 Fall 2007 Brandyberry

Instructor: Alan Brandyberry

Office: Business Administration, Room A425

Phone: 330-672-1146

Email: abrandyb@kent.edu

Office Hours: Monday 3:30-6:15pm or By Appointment

 

 

The primary goal of this project-oriented course is to apply what you have learned in previous theory courses on systems analysis in a collaborative project or projects to develop a business information system (or systems). To be successful in this project, you will draw upon and sharpen a range of capabilities including your analytic, design, communication, organizational, and interpersonal skills. This course will extend your previous background in systems analysis by introducing and employing an alternative development methodology (eXtreme Programming).

 

The specific objectives of this course are the following:

 

·                                To gain an understanding of agile development methodologies, specifically, eXtreme Programming (XP).

·                                This class is designed to closely approximate a real-world programming environment as closely as possible.

·                                To work as part of a team on a software development project to produce a working business information system that you will demonstrate to the instructor and the class at the end of the semester.

 

 

 

This will be detailed during the class meeting of Monday, September 10.

 

 

 

The course web server will be used to house the official copy of the class project.  You are responsible for making backup copies of ALL the work you do, which includes code, SQL scripts, web pages, and other project files, to media that you keep in a safe place. Please remember that files are sometimes accidentally deleted, hard disks crash, and PC’s become unusable after an unexpected power surge. The only way you can continue to work on your project without a significant impact is to recover your work from backup media.

 

 

You can obtain your own copy of Microsoft Visual Studio.Net 2005 that you can use for educational purposes only while you are registered for an M&IS course that is using this software. The instructions for obtaining your own copy of the software are at the following web site:

 

 

 

 

There are two main prerequisites for this course:

 

·                You are expected to be familiar with the basic theory of systems analysis and development. This requirement can be met by having taken M&IS 24060 Systems Analysis I and M&IS 24070 Principles of Systems Development.

·                You are also expected to understand basic programming. Please be aware that this course is NOT designed to teach programming.  However, you will undoubtedly gain skills as you apply yourself to this project.

 

All of our texts are available on SAFARI (these are available online on or off campus – see proxy instructions for off campus use):

 

 

Course Introduction

Beck Chapters 1-8 Discussion

 

Labor Day

 

Quiz – Beck Chapters 1-8

Project Introduction

 

Each Meeting (times approximate):

–        6:15 Development Meeting

•         Communicate with customer (demo/feedback/new ideas, etc.).

•         Review of last week’s accomplishments, problems, resolutions.

•         Incremental Design, new stories, conceptual “test first”.

–        7:00 Coding and Problem Identification

•         This time should be spent in pair-programming tasks. 

•         Remember pair-programming principles and test-first programming.

•         As much as possible this time should be used exclusively for coding.  If you encounter a technical problem that you cannot easily resolve, move on to another coding issue and identify that problem for later research.  These problems will generally be…

•         “How do I ….?”

•         “Is it possible to….?”

•         You should only spend significant amounts of time trying to solve these problems during the coding session if it is impossible to do any more coding without the problem being resolved.

–        8:30 Build Working Solution

•         Build final working solution.  There should be no run-time errors.  Working items should be able to be demonstrated.  Stub out non-working tests so they fail gracefully.  Note stories that have been completed and status of incomplete stories.

–        8:45 Problem Ownership

•         Divide up any technical (or other) problems that were encountered.  If there are too few problems for everyone to have one then multiple team members will work on the same problem independently.

•         Solving these problems may require trial coding, web and book research, etc.  This is your homework for each week.  Not doing your homework will let your team mates and yourself down.  If you try valiantly to solve the problem and cannot, then ask your team mates (and/or instructor) for help.  Do not just show up at the next coding session with no solution.

•         This obviously requires you to work in advance sufficiently to ask for help if required.

 

 

This is a project-oriented course and therefore some grades are given based on the performance of the team as a whole, i.e., each member of the team typically gets the same grade. There could be an exceptional situation where it becomes clear that a particular member of the team is simply not performing at the same level as the others. In such cases, it is possible that the members of the team may get different grades.  Individual grades on the group project will be based on a subjective assessment of the instructor utilizing both first-hand observation and peer-review.

 

The grade will be determined as follows:

 

 

Letter-grade determinations will be made on the following percentage basis (your score rounded to the nearest whole number): A >93; A- 90-92; B+ 87-89; B 83-86; B- 80-82; C+ 77-79; C 73-76; C- 70-72; D+ 67-69; D 60-66; F <60.

 

 

This is an active learning oriented course.  Your learning will be based substantially on what happens in class and therefore absences are strongly discouraged and penalized.  If you have an unexcused absence, you will lose 5% of the course points per absence.  In other words, if your final score is 91% of the total points and you have three unexcused absences, your final point total will be 91%- 15% = 76%.   If this seems harsh, please note that we have only 13 class days.  Each absence represents 1/13^th or 7.7% of the course content.  It would be very reasonable to penalize 7.7% rather than only 5%.

 

A.    Students attending the course who do not have the proper prerequisite risk being deregistered from the class.

 

Students have responsibility to ensure they are properly enrolled in classes.  You are advised to review your official class schedule (using Web for Students) during the first two weeks of the semester to ensure you are properly enrolled in this class and section.  Should you find an error in your class schedule, you have until Sunday, September 9, 2007 to correct the error with your advising office.  If registration errors are not corrected by this date and you continue to attend and participate in classes for which you are not officially enrolled, you are advised now that you will not receive a grade at the conclusion of the semester for any class in which you are not properly registered.

 

B.     Academic Honesty:  Cheating means to misrepresent the source, nature, or other conditions of your academic work (e.g., tests, papers, projects, assignments) so as to get undeserved credit.  The use of the intellectual property of others without giving them appropriate credit is a serious academic offense.  It is the University's policy that cheating or plagiarism result in receiving a failing grade (0 points) for the work or course.  Repeat offenses may result in dismissal from the University.

 

C.    Course Withdrawal:

For Fall 2007, the course withdrawal deadline is Sunday, November 4, 2007.

 

D.    Students with disabilities: 

University policy 3342-3-18 requires that students with disabilities be provided reasonable accommodations to ensure their equal access equal access course content.  If you have documented disability and require accommodations, please contact the instructor at the beginning of the semester to make arrangements for necessary classroom adjustments.  Please note, you must first verify your eligibility for these through the Student Disability Services (contact 330-672-3391 or visit www.kent.edu/sds for more information on registration procedures).