Portfolio Guidelines

Purpose

There are several objectives in producing a portfolio:

Format

Use any appropriate professional presentation suitable for submitting to a prospective employer.   Recommended format is a three-ring binder with a cover page and tabbed pages to separate each item.  A binder with a pocket is useful for holding a diskette or CD-ROM.

Content

Suggested: four to six items.  Each item is some artifact you created individually during this course, not part of the team project. Each item needs an overview page that includes a summary explaining the item and a description of what the item demonstrates about your learning or understanding.

Include a diskette with all the items in computer readable format.

The first item is the Programming Warmup Project. (Spring 2002 only).

Evaluation

Level of Mastery - Consult Bloom's Taxonomy of Cognitive Objectives.  Items which demonstrate cognitive mastery at higher levels on Bloom's chart earn a better grade.

Variety - the items should present a variety of topics.  If all 6 items are programming exercises, you probably won't earn a high grade.

Novelty - the portfolio items should present something you have learned that is new for you personally.  If you already new how to create a combo box with Swing before you took this course, I won't be very impressed if you write a Java program with a combo box.

Individuality / creativity - Ideally the portfolio shows that you can take the topics in the course an apply them to learning something that is personally significant for you.  Items which demonstrate you have internalized the course concepts and creatively applied them to some problem in a way that illustrates your unique perspective will be rewarded with the best grade.

You are welcome to submit items at any time during the quarter to obtain feedback from the instructor. You may revise the item to incorporate feedback or suggestions for improvement.

Suggestions

Tools and Techniques
    Learn some new tool or technique and demonstrate your skill in applying it.

Review
    Write a review of a technical article or book about software engineering.  Feel free to consult John's favorite books.

Requirements
    Write a critique of a requirements document from one of the case studies presented in class.
    Write a requirements document for some application.
    Write a user manual for some application.

Refactoring
    Improve the design of one of the case studies.
    Find an application on the web and refactor it.

Maintenance
    Improve or enhance one of the the case studies to provide greater functionality, platform independence, etc.

Testing
    Write test cases for some application.

Design
    Create a design for some application.

Implementation
    Learn some new aspect of Java: internationalization, networking, WebStart, etc.

Project Management
    Write a project management document, such as a project plan, quality assurance plan, training plan, risk management plan, or configuration management plan for your team or other project (real or hypothetical).


Examples

Rewriting a term project from CSc 103 so that it conforms to the CPE 308 class coding standard, including javadocs.
Writing a quality assurance plan for a team project in another class.
A book review of "Peopleware."
Writing a training plan for a 308 project team.
Learn how to use the Together tool and demonstrate it's capabilities on a sample project.
Obtain a Swing GUI builder tool and use it to create a Swing GUI for the LetterPairs project.
 



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