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Please read the entire textbook and refer to it frequently as you develop your project and work on your case study.

All Students must access the course in Canvas and complete the Week 1 (Module 0) assignments/activities by 8/26/2020.  Failure to show attendance (login to course) and participation (completion of assignments/activities) in the course by this date will result in withdrawal for non-attendance.  A student will lose all tuition and fees paid for a class from which they are withdrawn for non-attendance.  The course orientation will introduce you to the course.

This is a distance learning course.  There are no course meetings scheduled.

This course includes up to three on-line video or telephone meetings during the term, usually via Zoom.  There is also a mandatory demonstration meeting near the end of the term, usually via Zoom.  This course also includes content and communication using Canvas.

1. Demonstrate proficiency in performing data file activities.
2. Demonstrate proficiency in performing analysis activities.
3. Demonstrate proficiency in performing coding activities.”

Upon completion of this course, the student will be able to demonstrate proficiency in designing, developing, testing, and implementing a sophisticated computer program, one that requires substantial programming effort, and that draws on key technical areas covered in previously taken courses.

You can use HawkNet (WebAdvisor) to obtain your final grade for the course.  You can use your assigned Hawkmail (Hawkmail365) email address if you wish to discuss your grades via email.  (Note, it may be possible to setup your Hawkmail account to forward all received emails to some outside email account; but you still must send mail from Hawkmail to discuss grades.)

Most college systems use a single sign-on user ID, known as HCC “NetID”.  Visit netid.hccfl.edu to register and to update your credentials.  (Your initial password is your uppercase first name initial, lowercase last name initial, and your seven digit student ID number.)  Note, the quickest way to resolve login issues is the HCC Live Web Portal (hcclive.hccfl.edu).

The college provides wireless network connections for students and guests on Dale Mabry campus.  For students, select the network “HCC_Wireless” from the list of available networks.  Follow the on-screen steps by entering your HCC email address and network password.  For HCC guests: Select “HCC_Guest” from available networks.  Follow the on-screen steps to complete registration.  This network will be available between 7:00 AM and 10:00 PM.  These are the only official HCC networks; don't use others that may appear.

Hawk Alert text messaging service allows you to receive important information regarding campus closures or emergencies.  You may also sign up for financial aid notifications and registration and payment deadlines.  This is a free service, although some fees may be applied by your cellular service provider or plan for text messages.  To sign up, or for more information, visit www.hccfl.edu/hawkalert/.

HCC's Student Assistance Program (SAP) offers resources tailored to student life, providing you with the right tools to help you through some of life's toughest challenges.  The college has contracted Baycare Health Management to provide free, professional, confidential counseling by telephone and in person.  A wide range of topics may be addressed through this program, including mental health counseling, budgeting, and financial concerns.  Please call 800-878-5470 or send email to baycaresap@baycare.org for further information.

HCC DM Open Lab
Computers with all needed software for this course are located in the Open Lab in DTEC 462 (Dale Mabry campus, Technology building, 4th floor).  A maximum of 12 students are allowed in the lab at a time.  Additional help is available via phone, email or other distance means.  Call 813.253.7330 for details.  Lab hours are:

(Note:  Lab technicians (“Lab Techs”) are not teaching assistants or tutors, and shouldn't be expected to help you with your coursework.)

Rules for Using HCC Facilities

1. No food or drinks near computer equipment.
2. Students bringing their own laptops need to use the wireless network only.  Students cannot disconnect network cables from classroom's computers to connect their personal devices.
3. Students are not allowed to disconnect monitors or computers to power their personal equipment.

Grading scale:  A=90-100,   B=80-89,   C=70-79,   D=64-69,   F=0-63

It is expected that at least 70% of students will successfully pass the project with at least 70% or higher, and that 70% of students will successfully complete the case study with a 70% or higher.  (See Project and Case Study below for more details.)

• During the orientation period a project, a development language, and a schedule of deliverables will be developed.  This may take several meetings.  In general, the student can pick the development language and tools most familiar to them, and suggest their own project.
• There are no set meeting times for this course.  Any meetins will be via phone, Zoom, or other remote methods, at a time arranged with the student.
• The student will submit each deliverable by email prior to the deliverable's due date.  You must submit using Canvas.
• Students can go to the open computer lab anytime they are open to work or to submit assignments.  Be sure you should leave yourself sufficient time to complete your work.  (So don't show up at 9:50 PM when the lab closes at 10:00 PM!)
• A student shall not, without my express authorization, make or receive any recording, including but not limited to audio and video recordings, of any class, co-curricular meeting, organizational meeting, or meeting with me.  Further you do not have my permission to post on the web or otherwise distribute my class lectures and other course materials.  (You can distribute freely any materials I make publicly available from the HCC (or the wpollock.com) website, without asking permission, provided you give me credit for the work and don't alter it.  Any other use will require expressly given permission.
• You must abide by the HCC Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) for computers and services.  In particular, you must not run network scanners, or attempt to obtain administrator (“root”) privileges or otherwise disrupt HCC computers and services.
• You must follow the academic honesty policy and the student code of conduct for HCC.  A second cheating offense will result in an “F” for the course, and your name will be turned over to the dean for further handling.  I take these matters very seriously.  You have been warned!
• Communications Policy:  I will respond to your emails within 48 hours or two business days.  HCC policy is that grades can only be discussed in person or via email only if you use your assigned HCC HawkNet (Hawkmail365) email account.

  Students wanting help from their instructor during office hours should first send an email.  A follow up can be arranged during office hours for a Microsoft Teams meeting, a Zoom meeting, or by other means.  During office hours, expect quick email responses.

• If you are having difficulty with some aspect of your project please feel free to ask me about it (well before the due date).  You can send emails of questions and/or your work-in-progress, to receive feedback and suggestions.
• All discussions and agreements reached between a student and their instructor must be documented, preferably in emails.  It is up to the student to ensure this happens.
• No appointment is necessary to see your instructor during scheduled, on-campus office hours.  You can just “walk-in”.  You can make appointments for other times as long as I'm available. 
• Occasionally my office hours will be canceled on short (or no) notice, for example if the dean calls me for a meeting.  Before driving out to campus just for my office hours, you can contact me the night before to make sure I still plan to be there.
• Late Policies:  Late assignments (projects or exams) generally will not be accepted.  An assignment is late if not turned in by the due date and time agreed to with the student's project schedule.  Don't wait until the last minute to submit an assignment or project; if a problem arises, you may miss the due date.

  Late assignments will be accepted late only if you obtain the instructor's permission prior to the due date of the assignment, or for a documented serious medical reason.  All late assignments are subject to a late penalty of at least one letter grade (10%) regardless of the reason for the delay.

  Work later than one week will receive a more severe late penalty; very late assignments without adequate excuses will receive a grade of F (0).  However if you have a very good reason your instructor may waive any or all of the late penalty.  (Examples of good reasons include extended illness that prevents working, being out of town for work, or military service.  Remember documentation will be required.)

• The danger of spreading flu or other disease requires some changes to normal policies.  HCC is implementing the recommendations for institutions of higher learning of the CDC.  (See www.cdc.gov/h1n1flu/guidance/ and www.flu.gov/ for guidance from the CDC.)  You won't need documentation if you miss class due to the flu.  (But if you think you have the flu, you should see a doctor as soon as you can.)  In the unlikely event of a school closure due to the flu, some plan to make up the missed work will be made.

  If you think you are sick, stay home.  Do not come to HCC until 48 hours after your fever has broken.  People are infectious to others for a day or so before they have any symptoms.  Flu is spread by touching doorknobs, computer keyboards, railings on stairs, etc., that were touched by someone with the flu.  Avoid shaking hands; use the “fist shake” (touching of fists) if you must use a physical greeting.  The most effective way to prevent catching the flu is to wash your hands frequently, especially after touching something that was touched by others.  Avoid unnecessary touching of eyes, nose and mouth.  While not as good as properly washing hands, hand sanitizers have been installed throughout the campus; use them often.

  HCC Covid-19 Policies — See the HCC COVID Statement for distance learning classes (PDF).

Each project is different, but all will include a project proposal, detailed requirements, a clear design, unit test framework, and a quality implementation that includes security and safety (as needed, for example to protect personally identifiable information), robust features, best practices, and quality comments.  All projects must include a user interface of some sort.  All projects must include persistent storage (files and/or a database).

The student is expected to pick their own project, which must be approved by the faculty advisor.  If a student selects a topic that requires a substantial technology-related learning curve, (such as learning a new language or operating system, etc.), then that portion of the effort is over and above the effort expected for the capstone project itself.  The project can take many forms, depending on your interests.  It must be educational, have a research component, and relate to your major.  It should also have a clear focus and well-defined success criteria.  You should analyze a problem, research known solutions and products that address the problem, develop a design and a plan, choose some interesting or challenging portion of the problem to implement and test.

Note that a simple CRUD application (that is, a user-interface wrapped around some data) is generally not acceptable as a project.  Example of such unacceptable projects include a program where a user clicks a button or link to view some information such as a zip-code or area-code finder, or an asset tracking system.

Examples of acceptable projects (feel free to use one of these) include:

• The communication layer of a multi-player network game
• Parsing National Automated Clearinghouse Association (NACHA) electronic payment files
• A GUI for database creation and maintenance
• Implementing a standard game (but should be more complex than “Minesweeper”)
• A defect tracking system
• On-line testing system for multiple choice tests
• Empty Parking Space Detector — A system would detect the location of empty parking spaces and report them to people entering the parking lot.  Various types of sensors could be used to detect the location of empty spaces.  Perhaps video cameras could detect the location of bare pavement.  Some type of display device at the entry of the parking lot would show the locations of empty spaces.  (This could be a cell phone app, one that might have commercial applications!)
• Music Transcriber/Comparator — A computer program that would take an audio source of music (probably a solo instrument), analyze which notes were played and when, then create a transcription of the song.  Additionally, this could compare a performance to a “correct” performance and give feedback to the musician about what errors were made (wrong notes, wrong times, etc.)
• Restaurant menu and order smart phone app — The customer can order food and pay their bill right from their phone, so no touching menus, pens, etc., making customers safer.
• E-medical records management systems.  (You could research standards in this area and implement a patient record management system.)
• Secure registration system for some website.  (Could be a smart phone app.)  Doing this well is non-trivial and will take some research.
• A Ticket System for College Football Games — It should set prices based on where you want to sit and applies appropriate discounts for Students,Alumni, Military and Seniors.
• Office Schedule Visualization Project — Allows the manual entry of employee work schedules.  Program will display the availability in a chart that allows for easy visualization of gaps.  Easily shows where scheduling conflicts may occur, and will even recommend a schedule based on the number of employees, the productivity peaks, and the day of the week.  (At HCC, Faculty office hours are subject to several constraints, so not all schedules are acceptable.  A good program should enforce any constraints.)
• Personal Medical Management Tool — This application allows for manual storage of medical reminders (cell, text, call, fax, email, ping, etc.) such as for medication refills, appointments, test result availability, medical-related phone numbers, and other pertinent data to a patient's well-being.  When medical services and organization can be difficult, this program allows the patient to stay reminded of important medical times and dates, as well as help inform approved friends or family members when updates are made or if appointments are missed.
• There may be some problem in your work environment that needs attention, is related to your major, and is of particular interest to you.  Many students choose such projects.  One example is a process for remote collaboration in a geographically dispersed development team.  The project involved interviewing participants, evaluating and choosing tools, installing the tools and developing a process around them, and finally using the new process on an ongoing project.
• There are many existing open-source projects that need developers.  You could contribute to some Mozilla project (e.g., Firefox), Apache project, Linux project, or any open-source project on GitHub or elsewhere.  Note such a contribution is generally not a complete program, but just a portion of one: a complex issue to resolve, adding a significant feature, refactoring a large but badly designed codebase, etc.

The final project will comprise a functioning original computer software project of significant scope and complexity.  It shall draw upon key technical areas covered in previously taken courses.  Various deliverables (milestones) will be required during the design and development of this project.  These are completely described in each of the assignment directions. 

While object-oriented projects are preferred, you may attempt a non-OO project with your instructor's permission.  The deliverables' directions attempt to cater to both styles of software.

Briefly, these deliverables include:

1. Project Proposal — The proposal document shall clearly describe the planned final project’s end product.  This document should contain graphics, images, or tables, which can be produced using other applications to clarify your intent.  It must be written using complete English sentences and have been spell- and grammar-checked.  The document must unambiguously describe what the proposed system will do.

   The document must include the following topics: working title of project, purpose of the project, platform (e.g., Windows, Mac, iOS), intended customer/user (that is, who the program is for), source of the idea for the project, development environment and/or tools to be used, development language(s), limitations or risks anticipated, tentitive schedule (built around the course milestones), estimated number of lines of code, documentation, user training and/or user documentation, and a delivery/installation plan.

   The document should also include anything not mentioned above that will be relevant or helpful when evaluating the proposal.  A typical proposal document will be 1-3 pages in length.  Your document should be saved in Microsoft Word format or as a PDF.

2. Requirements Document — Once the proposal is done and approved, you will submit a detailed and complete written copy of the proposal requirements.  Detailed "use cases" describing all functional requirements.  Any non-functional requirements (such as performance requirements, e.g., response time to a keypress) must be documented as well in this document.  Use cases are often graphical using UML notation, but that is not required.  A typical requirements document will be 5-8 pages in length.  Your document should be saved in Microsoft Word format or as a PDF.
3. Test Matrix — Once your proposal and requirements documents unambiguously describe everything that your project will do, it is time to produce a test matrix.  Use only the provided Excel spreadsheet to capture all of your system’s testable requirements.  Each row of the spreadsheet will contain one of the system’s requirements; note that some use-cases from the requirements document will become multiple test items here.  For example, if your system is supposed to allow up to ten simultaneous users doing queries, then the requirements would say, “User successfully performs a query" and "Ten simultaneous users”.  Doing this allows you to easily list all of the system’s requirements so that you’ll remember to design and test each one.  The Test Matrix, once approved, will be “frozen” and used during the final demonstration to ensure that each requirement has been adequately fulfilled.  This means test matrix serves as your project's acceptance test suite.  Make sure you include all of your requirements in this matrix.

   Remember that the Test Matrix will be used as a grading tool when you demonstrate your project at the end of the term.  For each item in the list, you must clearly describe what the feature or function does and also clearly describe how it will be tested or verified (will something be measured?  Will a file be checked?  Should something happen within a certain period of time?  Etc.).

4. Preliminary Design — The preliminary design (also known as the system architecture or the high-level design) document describes the preliminary or top-level design of the system under development.  The document shall be saved in Microsoft Word format or as a PDF.  For non-object-oriented projects, it shall include flowcharts, hierarchy charts, and pseudocode.  It can also include any other graphical or tabular features useful for communicating a software system’s design to a reviewer such as class diagrams.  (UML is encouraged but not required for diagrams.)  Remember that the design of the system relates to its internal structure and architecture (in other words, the design shows how the program is built internally, as well as the parts that users will see.)

   A typical non-object-oriented preliminary design document will be 8+ pages in length and will contain many diagrams and visual depictions.

   For object-oriented designs (OOD), the system architecture is described (such as "MVC", "client-server", "micro-services", "3-tier", and so on.  No pseudocode or flowcharts are needed at this point, however you should document any design decisions made at this time such as which testing framework to use, your persistence choice, etc.  A typical object-oriented preliminary design document will be 2-5 pages in length.

   In both OO and non-OO design, you should describe your intended testing framework, development workflow, and your development/build environment here.  For example, for a Java project you might say “I will be using JUnit for testing, Maven for dependency management, Git for version control, and using  test-driven development workflow.”

5. Detailed Design — The detailed design expands the preliminary design document.  It shall incorporate any revisions or updates from the preliminary design document feedback.  It shall also describe the detailed design of the system under development.  A detailed design should capture the name, purpose, inputs, outputs, and details of every module/class/method/function that the system will contain (it doesn't contain the code for each of the modules/methods/function; the code comes after the detailed design document.)

   A detailed design document is a comprehensive document that could be used to assign programmers the job of coding individual modules/methods/functions.  The document shall be submitted in Microsoft Word format or as a PDF.  It shall include flowcharts, hierarchy charts, pseudocode and/or any other graphical or tabular features useful for communicating a software system's detailed design to a reviewer.

   A typical non-OO detailed design document will be 10-20 (or more) pages in length and will contain many diagrams and visual depictions.  It must document every package/module/class/method/function that will be in your final implementation.

   For object-oriented development, there is usually no detailed design document!  (The detailed design is developed through test-driven development and won't be known until you've completed a substantial part of the project implementation.)  None-the-less, you are required to submit something for this once you've worked out some of your design choices.  Note if you do not use test-driven development (or some equivalent), you will need to have the same sort of detailed design document as for non-object-oriented projects: class and other diagrams and method pseudocode.

6. Unit Test Suite (and code skeleton) — In this phase you translate your design into a skeleton program, which typically means a set of classes or modules with functions (depends on your programming language) with stub public methods (methods with a correct signature/prototype and return statement, but no implementation at all).  The skeleton should include comments based on the design.  Building a test database (or test data files) is also part of this phase.

   You will probably need some simple user interface (for example, a PHP web interface) to be able to examine and update your data.  This "scaffolding" code is in addition to your actual project code, as is any testing code and deployment scripts.  Then build and deliver a unit test suite, based on the design and requirements.  You can use any test framework approved by your instructor, but here are recommendations:  For Java, use JUnit.  For C#, VB, or any .net language, use NUnit.  For other languages, find an appropriate testing framework (which you should have your faculty advisor approve).

   Remember, the purpose of the unit tests is to ensure the implementation properly fulfills the design.  You need enough test cases for this.  (At this point, none of your tests are expected to pass.  You work on making each test pass, one at a time, in the implementation and testing phase.

   Note for object-oriented, test-driven development, tests and the detailed design (and the implementation) are all developed at the same time.  Your instructor understands that, but for grading purposes you need to submit a test suite before the implementation is done.  You are allowed to expand your test suite later.

7. Implementation — After the initial unit tests are built, you enter the major phase of your project, implementation and testing (this is the phase where you write and test your source code and make your unit tests pass).  During this phase, you may decide you need to revise your design.  (You are required to keep your faculty advisor informed as to your progress and to make any design changes.)  You will also likely need to add to your test suite as you implement code.

   If your implementation is complicated, it can be split into two or more milestones, each of which is a deliverable.  During this phase, it is strongly recommended that you use a version control system (VCS) such as Git.  Such tools are often built into IDEs or are available as add-ons.  The deliverable for this phase is a document containing all of your documented source code as well as all of your user documentation (manuals, instruction guide, help files, etc.)  Note every module/package, every class, and every public member (or public function) must contain suitable documentation as comments.  For example, in Java you will use "doc-comments" and run "javadoc" tool to generate final API documentation.  Additional documentation (including user manuals or other help) are also due at this phase.  (It is not expected such additional documentation will be complete or in its final form, but do not ignore documentation!)

8. Final Project Demo and Presentation — The final project shall include these deliverable components: (a) an executable computer program, (b) a demonstration of that program on the system’s target platform, and (c) a documentation package containing all of the program’s source code as well as the final version of the design documents.  (Remember that the Test Matrix will be used as a grading tool during the demo.)  It shall also contain user or other technical documentation to accompany the program.

   A demonstration of a substantially working computer program is critical for success in this class.  Without a demonstration of a substantially working computer program, the best grade possible in the course is a C.

   The demo is typically via Zoom screen sharing, but other means can be arranged if necessary.  It is up to the student to communicate with their faculty advisor when ready, to schedule the presentation before the end of the term.