Team projects:

Team projects will allow students to learn planning, report writing, teamwork, preparing and making presentations, and interacting with a customer.

Students will be asked to form teams of three to five.  The maximum team size will depend on class enrollment, higher enrollment leading to larger team sizes with a limit of five. An early lecture will be devoted to familiarizing the students with what is involved in team projects and how they will be graded.

Each team will be assigned a commercially or instructor sponsored project that offers an opportunity to learn about the practice of software testing throughout the software life cycle, and relate it to the topics covered during lectures. A variety of companies will be requested to offer projects. While the instructor will grade each project, a representative from the sponsoring company, and the instructor, will regularly interact with the corresponding team to resolve any technical issues related to the project.  This procedure has been used successfully since 1991 in CS 406 (now CS 307).

Team progress will be evaluated on a regular basis through in-class presentations, demonstrations, and written reports. Final grade for each team member will be computed using the Individual Contribution Index (ICI) determined at the end of the semester. The ICI is a number between 0 and 1 that determines the relative contribution of a team member towards meeting the overall project objectives.  A 0 indicates no contribution while a 1 indicates the highest contribution.  A detailed procedure for computing the ICI has been successfully used for over five years to evaluate team projects in CS 406. Students have been generally satisfied with this student- as well as instructor- centered procedure.