COMP3900: Computer Science Project

Prerequisites:

I hate project courses, especially when you need to group with people you don't know. Luckily, my group members were good, and made the whole experience palatable. Definitely coordinate tutorial times with your friends to get a good group you get along with, or the whole experience might just be hell. Although there's "lectures" they basically aren't anything useful, and there's only about 3 or 4 of them throughout the term. The majority of the marks are in the final demo, but if you leave it until the week before the final demo, you probably won't have enough time. If you plan on doing a custom project, make sure you have enough features to satisfy your tutor, but not too many. Our tutor wasn't convinced so we added more features to get approval and suffered for it. You can use any language you want as long as your tutor will be able to follow your instructions to set up and run your project on their own computer. From what I can tell, the requirement that your project be "novel" is just so they can give no one 100% in those criteria. Overall a pretty bad course, I really hate project courses, and we left our milestones until the days before the deadline so didn't sleep for days at a time to get it done. Our tutor was relatively nice marking though.

1x 2hr Lecture (sort of, see comments), 1x 2hr Tutorial/Lab

3/5 (varies a lot depending on your team and project)

Yes, all recorded.

Matthew Sladescu

Lecture slides (not very useful) uploaded.

1/5 (also varies a lot depending on your team and project)

2020 T2

94 HD

- 10% Project Proposal
- 2 x 2.5% Progressive Demos
- 2 x 2.5% Retrospectives
- 20% Software Quality (this was the actual code)
- 20% Project Report
- 20% Final Demo/Presentation
- 20% Peer Assessment
- A work diary that was not marked but checked to see what progress you did. (Probably would've been deducted marks from your final result if your diary was blank, suggesting you did nothing.)

COMP2521 + COMP1531, as well as 102 UoC completed in the computer science degree. (Note that software engineering students do not need to take this course.)

This is one of the later core courses to computer science students. It's not required in software engineering degrees mostly due to the fact that the software engineering degree already mandates many projects of a similar calibre as well.

Honestly, this course was the biggest waste of my time at university thus far. It's really taught me nothing but that at this point in time, I hope I will never be a software engineer in the future. I already hated having to design software from COMP1531, and this is just that on steroids. And no matter how much the software development life cycle makes sense (user stories, gradual coding and testing etc.) makes sense, I don't want to do it.

The default projects lacked too much variety. They literally felt like the same project but just in different applications. Difficulty may have been skewed for us though because the optional project we picked was probably taking things a bit too far. The software worked (at least, it satisfied our user stories), but it cost countless hours of sleep.

And honestly that's why I'm not proud of my "mark". It really felt like my team members' marks, because very often I couldn't even tell what was going on. I was just super blessed to have a ridiculously strong team that didn't hate me for my ineptness in the project. It was also quite stressful seeing the times when they'd have to lose sleep over the tasks at hand.

Proposal also took forever for 10%. It felt like the amount of work required for a 30% weighted task.

So pretty much I could salvage nothing fun out of this course. The 0.1 rating is entirely to credit that our tutor was so extremely nice to us.

- 2 hr tutorial every week, but you only had to stay for your portion which was often at most 30mins
- 2 hr lecture in weeks 1, 2, 3, and 10, but they often did not take up the entire 2 hours.
- Not really "contact" time, but an undefinable amount of hours working with your team members on the project itself.

4.5/5 (this varies from group to group though)

Yes

Matthew Sladescu

Some slides on project management (and of course the assessment guidelines). That was roughly it.

0.1/5

N/A

20T2

Not revealing this one because I'm not proud of it.