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CS486: Senior Capstone
Design
Guidelines for Design Project Sponsors
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CS486: Senior Capstone
Design
Guidelines for Design Project Sponsors
The first step towards participating in the Capstone Design experience is submitting a project description. This is a crucial step, allowing CS faculty and students to evaluate the nature of the project and skills required to complete it; mis-communication at this foundational stage will almost certainly result in frustrations for all parties. The project description is not a requirements or specification document, but rather a first statement of the problem. It should briefly outline the project, including any known constraints, fixed deadlines, or other specific requirements. Detailed requirements and specifications will be developed jointly by the student team and the sponsor in the initial phases of the project.
To help structure project descriptions, I have developed a template for project descriptions that outlines the key pieces of information CS faculty and students need in order to make robust decisions about projects. Project descriptions may be submitted in any format (e.g. as an email, a MSWord document, an HTML document, etc.), so long as they are structured to address these key pieces of information. To provide further guidance, I have posted a number of sample project descriptions submitted by past sponsors as models.
Of course, a project description is only the first step in the Capstone process. Success of projects relies critically on continued commitment of sponsors to projects. These commitments center around client-contractor communication, and are no different than those one would expect between clients and contracts in a conventional out-sourcing context. They include: :