Group Software Development

Initiative

You are being evaluated in this module on your contributions to the group software development initiative(s) that you are a part of and upon your commitment to helping peers on your team.

When you are not sure what to do next, ask.

If you cannot get an answer to the question of what to do next, help a teammate.

Strong learning skills will propel your achievement.

Kanban boards

It is your responsibility to maintain the project status board for issues that you are assigned to.

Links to status boards from last year’s projects – will be updated shortly to reflect plans for this year:

• Alumni Stories
• Check In
• Mailroom Assistant
• Musicals @ LCS
• School Life Guide

Source control

In short:

• Before you start working on a new issue, be sure you update your fork of the project on GitHub, then pull those changes down to Xcode.

  IMPORTANT

  Completing this one simple step will mostly avoid merge conflicts later on.

• Always write code for an issue on an issue branch.
• When you believe your work is finished, make a pull request against the development branch.

Here are the specifics for how to do the steps above.

Links to each team’s repository on GitHub – will be updated shortly to reflect plans for this year:

• Alumni Stories
• Check In
• Mailroom Assistant
• Musicals @ LCS
• School Life Guide

Documenting your progress

On GitHub

When details about what you have accomplished will be useful to your current project partners, or other developers in the future, document that in the issue itself, or when appropriate, the pull request.

EXAMPLE

Here is an example from work that Mr. Gordon completed over December Break. A hard-to-track down problem, where QR code scans were not being recorded in the database, ended up being related to user authentication – specifically – to how users were being logged out of the application.

Before and after videos or photos, where appropriate, should be added to pull requests.

In your portfolio

For each class, please make a brief entry in your portfolio on Notion, identifying what issue(s) you worked on. Please include links to pull request(s) or the specific issue(s). Write generally about how things are going. Identify whom you have helped on your team and in what way(s), when that has occurred. In this post, you can ask for help if stuck or reflect on your progress. These portfolio entries need not be lengthy.

You will generate evidence tied to many course learning goals by contributing to your group software development initiative. Be sure that you tag your portfolio entries.

IMPORTANT

The portfolio entry on Notion for each class is a must. As needed, overdue status flags will be set in Edsby for missing or incomplete portfolio updates. Saturday Study referrals may be placed, as needed.

Conclusion

Contributions to a software development project are both an opportunity to learn and to demonstrate your understanding.

You will be evaluated through a process of triangulation, as originally described in our course outline:

If it helps to clarify your thinking about what is expected of you, ask yourself two questions in this thought exercise, in the context of a hypothetical future where Mr. Gordon has formed a software startup after retiring from teaching in 2034:

1. Would Mr. Gordon want to hire me based on my approach to making contributions this month?
2. If some of my teammates already worked at Mr. Gordon’s startup company, would they encourage Mr. Gordon to hire me?