Software Engineering

Last jobs

Here's what to do to wrap up your successful project and successful year.

For clients:

Polish your product. There shouldn't be a lot to do since (in principle) you've been doing it incrementally all year long.

Fix bugs.
Check documentation to make sure it is complete and accurate (and free of spelling errors).
Make sure licensing information is appropriately displayed on web page, in on line help, in install script and in code.
Visit all the links on your project web page and update content as appropriate. You may want to revise your vision statement so that it reflects what you actually built.

For future developers:

Polish your project: leave it in the state you'd want to find it in if you had to fix it or extend it. Most of this information belongs on the wiki.

Clean the wiki. Deprecate out of date pages so that future developers don't waste time reading them.
Bugs you haven't had time to fix should be well described.
Features you haven't had time to implement should be documented as much as is reasonable. (Short stories and use cases appropriately flagged can do the job.)
Discuss any refactorings you think your architecture requires in order to make it easier to improve and maintain.
Your (one step) build should be easy to run and to modify.
Check that your code is clean and consistently commented.
Post the final version of your code on the project web page for download (as required by the GPL) since you can't rely on the svn server remaining available. (zip is OK).

For me:

Recall that we began the year with simulated job interviews. We'll end it with simulated performance reviews. Please sign up for one some time between May 6 and May 13 on the schedule at evaluationSchedule.html. That file is group writeable so you should be able to edit it.

Please come to your interview with

Hard copy of your updated resume (posted on your updated web page).
Hard copy of some code you wrote for your project. (We didn't get to code reviews this year either ...)
Some short written comments on the course and on your performance. What went well? What went badly? What should I do differently next time? What would you do differently next time? What was the most important thing you learned? What was the most important thing you didn't learn? Was the course hard or easy? Interesting or tedious? Did you put in lots of time or little? What grade do you think you've earned?