Guidelines & Instructions

Project Overview. Work on the project is done as part of a course sequence during the fall/spring semesters.  Project sponsors should remember this is foremost an academic experience. The delivery of the final implementation marks the end of the project. No maintenance will be provided after the end of project. Student teams will strive to achieve the milestones and project deliverables but these outcomes are not guaranteed. The students will receive a grade for their effort based on sponsor input and capstone instructor evaluation. 

 What this project is:

• An educational experience for the students.

• An opportunity for you to interact with students in the Software Engineering programs. 

• An opportunity for students to interact with project sponsors and work on a team for an extended time to design and implement a project with realistic constraints and requirements.

 What this project is not:

• Staff augmentation and extension of your development teams to meet your critical deadlines.

• A research project - teams must implement one or more software deliverables.

• We require that sponsors indemnify or otherwise hold harmless students for the work product's that they produce. 

Non-disclosure and Intellectual Property. The Arizona Board Regents policy on Intellectual Property (Policy 6-908) states that student-created works are the property of the students.  Students can be asked to sign a non-disclosure in advance of any work.  Any agreement must be included as part of the proposal so students can review and agree to sign in advance of any work. Please contact the coordinator if you have any questions or concerns.  

•  A non-compete agreement is not appropriate for an academic experience and students may not be asked to sign such agreements.

•  All capstone teams are required to present their work at a poster session in the Innovation Showcase at the Polytechnic Campus at the culmination of the project. Further, instructors must be able to review and assess student work. These activities do not require the disclosure of proprietary information, but some visibility into the project is needed.  

Expectations of Project Sponsors. The main requirement is your time. Participation typically consists of four to eight hours monthly.  Expected support consists of:

• Set product requirements and quality expectations.

• Provide students with insight on the project approach, plan and technology.

• Provide specialized hardware, software or documentation, as needed.

• Be available for questions and clarification on requirements and specifications.

• Provide feedback to the coordinator and/or instructor on the team’s progress.

• Meet with and communicate with the team on a regular basis, but no less than once a month (to be determined by the sponsor and the team members at the start of the project). The guidelines we suggest is at least 1 hour every 2 weeks. 

• Review deliverables and provide feedback to students in a timely manner.

• For faculty and ASU community members: please remember that as far as students are concerned you are an external customer and as such neither the expectations from you as a sponsor nor from students to deliver are any different from an industry sponsored project. 

Expectations of Students. All students are expected to actively participate on their project team.  As a unit, the teams are expected to do the following:

• Plan the project and set the schedule of task and deliverable completion.

• Meet at least once per week as a team and to record meeting minutes.

• Keep the project plan up to date and track progress.

• Communicate on a regular basis with the sponsor participants.

• Produce deliverables as required by the project and course requirements in a timely fashion.

Funding Expectations from Project Sponsors. Project sponsors are not expected to provide funding for projects except as follows:

• If the project will entail expenses such as hardware, software licenses, or travel, then the project sponsor should identify these at the time of the proposal and cover such expenses as they are incurred (or make alternate arrangements with the Coordinator). 

• Project support, in the form of research gifts (hardware, software and direct funds to support the project and activities) is appreciated. If you would like to give, please indicate this in the project proposal form (at the end of this document).

Proposal Procedure. Interested parties should complete the Software Engineering Capstone Proposal (Submit Proposal link) as soon as possible.  If multiple projects are proposed, please use a separate form for each project proposal. It is possible to have multiple instances of the same project (multiple copies of the same project, not multiple teams on one project).