A 15-session project course in which teams of four turn an idea into a working application, learning project management, software design and agile practices along the way.

Type

Course

Duration

45h - 15 blocs/sittings

Teams

4 students

Materials

12 slide decks and 6 assignment briefs (PDF)

Language

French

View the course on GitHub

What the course covers

The first lectures lay the groundwork for any IT project: its life cycle from initiation to closure, human, material, financial, time and information resources, project types and sizes, estimation, risk management and team communication, with Uber as a case study. They continue with how teams are organized (Wysocki’s project types, external and internal team structures such as the chief programmer team or egoless programming), how to check an idea’s commercial feasibility, and why software projects fail, with ISO 12207 as a reference for software processes.

The design block then covers the requirements document and Gantt charts, software architecture (monolith versus microservices), design models such as client-server, MVC and MVVM, testing approaches including TDD, detailed UML models (use case, class, sequence and activity diagrams) and wireframes.

The last lectures cover agile work with Scrum and Kanban (roles, backlogs, Definition of Done, burndown charts, sprint 0, sprint reviews and retrospectives) and Git (branches, pull requests on GitHub and merge conflicts).

Assignments

Teams of four build their project through a series of deliverables:

• Assignment 1: the project artifacts, from the idea’s feasibility and originality to the functional requirements, high-level design, UML diagrams and wireframes
• Assignment 2: a revised version that addresses my feedback
• A presentation of the requirements and design
• Assignment 3: agile planning with a Gantt chart and an agile board, then sticking to that schedule
• Assignment 4: the finished application, delivered with its code and a guide to run it locally, graded on code quality, whether it works and its documentation
• A final presentation of the complete application

Structure

• Session 1: introduction to application design
• Session 2: organizations
• Session 3: commercial feasibility
• Session 4: software development
• Session 5: requirements document
• Session 6: general design
• Session 7: midterm exam
• Sessions 8–9: detailed design with UML
• Session 10: detailed design with wireframes
• Session 11: agile with Scrum
• Session 12: agile retrospective
• Sessions 13–14: introduction to Git
• Session 15: final presentation

Acknowledgements

I thank Prof. Antoine Moevus (Collège Ahuntsic) for sharing his knowledge and content related to this course; several lectures cite him as a source.

View the course on GitHubView the assignments on GitHub