Pivotal

This is an in-progress document that outlines how your use of Pivotal Tracker will be evaluated. Recall that documentation and use of Pivotal will count for 5% of your final grade in this course.

One of the meta-goals of this course is to give you the experience of building and maintaining a long-running application. In your coursework you normally produce code that runs for the duration of a 10-30 minute demonstration and never needs to be run again. Though you do learn valuable skills from this experience, developers will tell you that maintaining code is a harder problem.

For your first project, you will implement an application that must run for the duration of the semester. There will most certainly be issues or bugs that arise after your first release and need to be fixed. Additionally, you will most likely identify changes you wish to make to accommodate new features or simply to improve your code. You are required to use the Pivotal Tracker system to manage your project and log bugs and issues.

Pivotal is a project management and issue tracking system. Using this kind of system, you can track bugs identified in your system, outline milestones for completion, outline new features for your system, and track changes that are required or desired. Any real software project uses a similar type of system.

There are many benefits of using a bug tracking/project management system that we will not exploit. For large teams, an issue tracking system enables better communication between team members as well as prioritization of tasks. You will also notice that Pivotal is based on agile software methods. You will likely not worry too much about using Pivotal to estimate project length, and so on.

You will be using Pivotal to demonstrate your progress (to me), keep track of goals for your project, and remember bugs and other issues that need to be addressed. I also reserve the right to log bugs as I see them. I will be monitoring the state of your data collection and will notify you via Pivotal if I detect a possible issue.

Expectations

1. Your Pivotal Project will be updated every time you work on your assignments. (You will also commit code changes to SVN every time you work on your assignment. Every semester I end up having students lose data they have failed to commit before a hard drive crash or similar.) This may mean that you add stories describing changes and features you need to work on in the future, or it may mean that you mark stories as completed and add any relevant comments.

2. You will use Pivotal both for bug tracking and project management. If you discover a problem with your application, log the problem in Pivotal. When you have the time to diagnose the problem, log your diagnosis in Pivotal. When you are able to resolve the issue, log the resolution in Pivotal. Similarly, when you have a new feature to be added, log it in Pivotal.

Grading Criteria

Your grade will include, but not be limited to the following criteria:

1. Have you consistently updated your project? I will expect to see weekly updates.

2. Does your project history outline all of your work on the project? Any feature in your application should be documented in Pivotal.

3. Have you repaired all of the bugs you identified?