The project team

Each group contains approximately four students. They work on their project during 22 weeks of study from the beginning of October until May of the following year. On average, each student works for about six hours per week on the project. The students work in small iterations along the entire software development life cycle from requirements gathering, over design and implementation to test and deployment of a solution.

Once a group has been allocated to the project in the first week of October, the team meets their client. They begin by trying to understand the motivation for the project and exploring the solution space. This requirements-gathering stage is a key part of the project itself.

Suitable projects

These are software engineering projects and thus must always involve the construction of a software system. Whilst software is the ultimate output of the project, the work involved may well require the students to investigate various technologies and alternative designs for the solution. These designs themselves form another type of project output.

Projects should be incremental in scope - at their core will be a minimum set of functionality that all student groups will be able to implement. Depending on progress, the team will increase the scope and scale of the system over time, providing more ambitious revisions of increasing value to the client. The students will take your exciting vision and work on it iteratively in incrementally scoped packages in an agile fashion.

Projects should not include a significant degree of investigative system modelling or any research. For example, any data science, machine learning or computer vision aspects need to be straightforward to implement with existing software packages.

By default backend systems will be implemented with Spring Boot in Java and mobile applications will be based on Android. It is possible to deviate from this on a case-by-case basis.

Responsibilities and involvement

The students will apply an agile development method that involves meeting with their client to present their progress, gain feedback and discuss the next steps. The purpose of these meetings is to steer the projects towards a mutually agreeable outcome.

Meeting frequency and duration will depend on the progress of the groups, but it is expected that they will happen every two to three weeks and last for around an hour. Online meetings/teleconferencing is now the norm

Besides these meetings with the students, the teaching staff will be in contact with the client from time to time to get feedback on their developing relationship with the students.

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