Company Manual (View All)

Introduction to CS428

      Congratulations, you have just been enlisted to work for an ad hoc software development group to be formed in the first week of this semester. Your minimum tour of duty will include the current semester or term. As some students have done before you, you are welcome to continue contributing after the semester is ended, when arbitrary motivations like grades have begun to fade into a distant memory.

      This manual is a guide to understanding your role in the group and will give you an overall view of the other roles. It will also provide some metrics and a rubric for some specific grading policies.

      The first section (Company layout) illustrates a top down view of the management chain which will be in place to govern the group.

      The second section (Roles and Positions) includes a detailed description of all the company positions and gives specific instruction on roles, deliverables, executions and other related information. You will want to read through them carefully as your first assignment will be to apply for your desired job.

      The third section (Communication) outlines some of the fundamental communication issues that are part of your success as a member of this group.

      What this manual will not do for you, or for the group as a whole, is provide direction on what you produce or how you produce it. This means you will not only need to solve technical problems, but more importantly you will need to solve problems of group dynamics and communication in order to effectively ascertain a correct view of the technical problems that actually need solving.

      The ambiguity inherent in your responsibilities is not fictional or arbitrary — it is inherent in the fact that you just joined an ad hoc software development group. As Jim Collins points out in "Good to Great," the toughest challenge in building a great company is getting the right people on the bus. Once the right people are on the bus, they figure out where it needs to go. You are the people on the bus. You need to figure out where to drive it.