You are building teams of highly capable individuals spread across two classes - CSC454/2527 and CSC491/2600. These classes have a different focus, with the former being on the business of software and the latter course being on the engineering of software (both focusing on startups).
Between these two classes, you will be building a proof of concept product for your startup and pitching it to individuals. From this program, we have had highly successful companies emerge. That could not have happened without the full collaboration of both CSC454/2527 and CSC491/2600.
Moreover, completing business and financial work for a product that doesn’t exist won’t do anyone any good. Building a product without input from specialists in business, finance, product, and other areas is very difficult.
We do not believe that this program can be successful without this collaboration. Students in CSC491/2600 are all in CSC454/2527, but not all students in CSC454/2527 are in 491/2600. For this reason, participation makes up part of the CSC454/2527 mark.
The mark will be determined based on your participation in your team’s GitHub repositories. Repositories are listed on your team’s profile.
You can see the snapshot of your participation. These stats will gauge your participation at a high level, on your profile.
You will be gauged on:
| Area | Details |
|---|---|
| Issue Creation | Everyone is expected to make issues to track your progress in the build. These issues can be about business, design, code, etc. Every discussion should be about an issue. If there is no issue, make one. |
| Issue Comments | Issue Comments are expected from everyone. You will lose marks if you don’t respond to questions of your teams at all or at least record decisions on the issues. If there is no issue for a decision to be recorded on, make one. |
| Commits / Changes | CSC491/2600 students are expected to commit and change code. These commits/changes are the actual code. CSC454/2527 students are highly encouraged to commit to the repo for code or docs when applicable, but this is not an expectation. |
Marks will be at least partially based on the stats above. Other factors can play a role. There is no specific rubric to how these pieces all interact to make up your participation mark, but as long as you actively participate you won’t have any concerns. We expect everyone to be engaged and generously participate in your team’s work across 454/2527 and 491/2600 in whatever capacity you can.
If you aren’t familiar with Issues or GitHub, it is recommended to go through the “Communicate in issues” section in GitHub’s Learning Lab.
Speaking and working over a synchronous medium like Slack, Whatsapp, Wechat, Zoom, and Google Hangouts can be a great way to make decisions and make sure the team is aligned.
However, these mediums do not lend themselves well to information being kept for the long term. Information synchronously shared can easily be lost, whereas recording a summary or a link to notes in a GitHub Issue links the conversation back to specific context. This is also helpful if you want to refer to information from the past.
This is why we track the number of comments made and use this as a proxy to make sure information is being recorded. If there is no appropriate issue to record information to, then make one.