The second course is “CSC491: Computer Science Capstone”, which has taken the place of the CSC494/495 directed studies projects I used to run (although I still sometimes take students into CSC494/495 if they can’t fit CSC491 into their timetable).  In the past, I’ve matched students up with clients—faculty in other departments, local non-profits, startups, open source organizations—who want something built.  Over the course of the term, the students go through the entire development cycle: requirements gathering, design, construction,  testing, deployment, and post-mortem evaluation.  The range of projects last winter was pretty broad, but all the clients seemed happy with what they got.

So, what should I do with these courses this fall?  Here’s just a few of my options:

1. Get the Capstone students to move (most of) DrProject to Django. The aim would be to create the “Trac 2.0″ that DrProject was meant to be; I think it’s ambitious, but doable, and would be a great introduction to open source/agile development. The downside is that students wouldn’t be working directly with real clients, which they have enjoyed and valued in the past.
2. Have the Capstone students do external consulting projects as before. Upside: making real people’s lives better, and strengthening ties between this department and the community. Downside: they don’t get the experience of working in a larger group on a larger code base, and it’s a lot more work for me :-).
3. Have the CSC301 students build another Facebook app. Upside: Facebook is still hot (well, lukewarm), and I know how to avoid some of last term’s potholes.  Downside: a lot of third-year students haven’t done web programming before, so it’s a far-from-level playing field.
4. Have the CSC301 students build a desktop GUI application using Swing, wxPython, or something like that. Upside: level playing field. Downside: finding something that’s worth build.

There are lots of other possibilities; if you’d like to add one to the pile, or cast a vote for one of the ones above, I’m easy to reach.

If anyone from Yahoo! find this:

1. I made the call at about 8:55 pm on Wednesday, July 23, 2008, from a Toronto (area code 416) number.
2. I now understand why the third link in a Google search for “yahoo! customer care” finds a complaint about your customer service.
3. I now also understand why “Google” has become a verb, and “Yahoo!” has become an also-ran.

*sigh*

1. I have tested this code and it works
2. I have tested this code and it does not work (on my computer)
3. I have tested this code and was able to reproduce the results from the paper
4. I have tested this code and was unable to reproduce the results from the paper

It’s a good start…

1. No idea what it is.
2. Use it/have used it infrequently.
3. Use it regularly.
4. Couldn’t get through the day without it.

My list is below; what have I forgotten, and (more importantly) how would you criticize this assessment method?

1. A command-line shell
2. Shell scripts
3. Version control system (e.g., CVS, Subversion)
4. Bug tracker
5. Build system (e.g., Make, Ant)
6. Debugger (e.g., GDB)
7. Integrated Development Environment (e.g., Eclipse, Visual Studio)
8. Numerical Computing Environment (e.g., MATLAB, Mathematica)
9. Inverse analyzer (e.g., Inane)
10. Spreadsheet (e.g., Excel)
11. Relational database (e.g., SQLite, MySQL, Oracle)
12. Layout-based document formatting (e.g., LaTeX, HTML)
13. WYSIWYG document formatting (e.g., Word, PowerPoint, OpenOffice)

Now, you have the same room full of scientists, and you want to find out how much they know about software development. There still isn’t time to interview them or have them solve some programming problems, so again you’re falling back on self-assessment. This time, the scale is:

1. No idea what it means.
2. Have heard the term but couldn’t explain it.
3. Could explain it correctly to a junior colleague.
4. Expert-level understanding.

and the terms themselves are:

Once again, my questions are (a) what have I forgotten, and (b) how “fair” is this as an assessment method?

In transit

This must be the place.

Whozat?

Or we could use recursion!

Mmm…

Dancing, dancing!

• MyTTC.ca is up (Jorge’s comments are more coherent than mine). Should this be the starting point for student projects in my fall CSC301 Software Engineering course?
• The science maps at Eigenfactor are pretty cool — this post talks about what’s going on behind the scenes.
• How much of your code is comments?  Meaningful identifiers?  Spacing?  Better yet, which open source project are you most like?
• Jon Udell is watching you, Senator Sununu.
• And finally, who owns science?