Senior Design and Development Syllabus

Instructor: Dr. John F. Santore
Phone: 508-531-2226
Office: Science Center 333
E-Mail: jsantore@bridgew.edu
Instructor Web Page: http://webhost.bridgew.edu/jsantore/
Course Web Page: http://webhost.bridgew.edu/jsantore/Spring2021/Capstone
Course Credits: 3
Contact Hours: 3
This is a required course for the computer science BS program.

Office Hours for Spring 2021:

• Mon 2-3pm

• Tues 11am-noon

• Wed 5-5:50pm (Just before grad robotics)

• Thurs 3:30-4:30pm

or by appointment

I also will take appointments if you cannot make my other office hours, however, I generally have meetings and work prepared for a day or two ahead so plan on about 48 hours from the time I get your request to us being able to meet.

I will be available for both online (MS Teams) and in person office hours. The University guidance for in person office hours is that we can do it – but we should prefer online/virtual office hours. If you need something sorted out on your computer this can be really important for some students. If you have questions that can be handled online, I’m happy to work that way, you are welcome to send me an MS Teams chat at any time which I can reply to when I can. We can also jump on to a screen sharing chat to answer specific questions.

Course Description:

This course provides the capstone experience for computer science majors. It pulls together the fundamental elements of the discipline and illustrates how these elements work together in practice. This course also exposes students to some cutting edge aspects of computer science. It requires students to think and write critically about the effects that our discipline can have on individuals and society. Students will design and implement a large team programming project.

Course Prerequisites: Comp442 (software engineering) and Senior Standing

Course Outcomes:

By the end of the course each student:

Textbook: Title:The Pragmatic Programmer, 20th Anniversary Edition Author: David Thomas, Andrew Hunt ISBN: 978-0-1359-5705-9

Class Requirements and grading:
Capstone classes typically work on larger pieces of software that has already been started. This class will do so as well. This project will be a large part of your grade. You will not be able to pass the course unless you can pass both the project related and exam parts of the course.

Project related work: 50% (coding, testing, design, etc)
Class(homework/quizzes/participation/presentation(s)):15%
Exams (one midterm and one final): 35%

Project Work:

There will be one group project and one solo project in this class. Each will be done in steps. You will be given the opportunity to form your own groups in the first or second weeks of the class. To assure that every student does his or her fair share of the work, exit interviews will be done after some deliverables where each student discuss the team's solution and work on their part of the project. Each person needs to understand the project and the group's contributions to the project. Questions on the quizzes and homeworks may also be used to assess your understanding of the project. Unlike some group projects, in this class, every group member  is expected to understand their own group's work in totality.

Non-Project work:

Non-project work (exams and misc assignments) are individual assignments and should not be done with any other classmates. (discussion without recording devices is always allowed for homeworks, exams are closed neighbor) The exam part of the grade will be split 15% for the midterm and 20% for the final exam.

Students with special needs:

Anyone who has special needs should contact me in the first week of classes so that reasonable accommodations can be agreed on.

Academic Integrity:

See https://catalog.bridgew.edu/content.php?catoid=8&navoid=632#Academic_Integrity_and_Classroom_Conduct for a complete description of the academic integrity procedure at Bridgewater.

Academic integrity will be taken very seriously in this class. All individual work must be your own. If you cheat or otherwise represent the work of others as your own. You will receive an F for the course.

Guidelines for proper academic integrity:

Discussing problems with your classmates can help you understand the problems and kinds of solutions to those problems that you will learn about in this class. In an effort to make in clear what sort of discussions are appropriate and encouraged in this class and which cross the line to academic dishonesty I use the following guidelines: You may discuss any out of class problem I assign in this class with your classmates or other so long as no one is using any sort of recording implement including, but not limited to, computers, digital recorders, pens, pencils, phones etc. This lets you talk about theoretical solutions without sharing the actual implementations. As soon as anyone in the group is typing, writing etc, all conversations must stop. You may look at someone else's program code only very briefly in order to spot a simple syntax error. As a rule of thumb, if you find yourself looking at someone else's code for more than about 30-45 seconds it is probably time to stop. If you are having trouble with your program, come to the instructors office hours for more help.

All in class exams and quizzes are closed book and closed neighbor. If you are found using a data storage device of any kind during one of these evaluations, you will be failed for the course.

Of course for your group work, your entire group is intended to produce a single deliverable and are expected to work together on all parts of that so the above does not apply to members of a group working together on their group work.

Standards for in class behavior:

All students coming into the in class sections will need to abide by the University's Covid Guidelines.

You are all adults and are expected to act as adults in this class. While questions are encouraged in this class, if a particular line of questioning is taking us too far afield, I will ask the student to come by my office hours or to see me after class.

Cell phones, pagers, electronic organizers and other devices should be silenced while in class. If you work of EMS or something similar, please turn your cell phones/ pagers etc to vibrate mode so that you are not disrupting others in the class.

In the unlikely case of trouble makers in the class, those who are simply attempting to disrupt the class will be asked to stop; those who will not, will be referred to the college for appropriate action. The BSU statement of class behavior can also be found at https://catalog.bridgew.edu/content.php?catoid=8&navoid=632#Academic_Integrity_and_Classroom_Conduct

Tentative Schedule: (I'll almost certainly move things around)

Week	Topic
Week 1	Introduction to the class Also soft skills throughout semester
Week 2	Automated Testing/ Continuous Integration
Week 3	Continuous Integration/Using and Storing Data
Week 4	Pragmatic programming/Code smells/Clean Code Part 1
Week 5	Data handling part 2
Week 6	Pragmatic programming/Code smells/Clean Code Part 2
Week 7	Automated Testing Part 2
Week 8	The effects of computing advances on individuals and society
Week 9	Design and Design Tradeoffs
Week 10	Using APIs (perhaps move this earlier)
Week 11	Group work, remote work
Week 12	Ethics and unintended consequences
Week 13	Pragmatic programming/Code smells/Clean Code 3
Week 14	Automated testing/formatting/pull requests and workflows
Final Exam week