Daniel H.K. King, Jasmine T. Ortega, Rada K. Rudyak, Rowan J. Sivanandam
The contract may be edited if the majority of members agree. Otherwise, each member has equal say in the concerns of the group.
The time expected for group members to work on DSCI 591 will tentatively be 20-40 hours on regular weeks.
Each team member is expected to submit their own work on time, or give as much notice as possible if circumstances make them late. Each team member is expected to fully review instructions and carefully follow the proposed solutions, including coding standards, documentation and adhering to proper grammar in project reports. Each team member is expected to treat this project as a professional commitment with due respect to fellow team members, partners and the project itself.
Git commit messages should be written professionally, in the present tense and generally following the https://www.conventionalcommits.org/en/v1.0.0/ format.
Group members should strive to attend all meetings, especially the partner meeting on Thursday from 1pm to 2pm on campus and the mentor meeting Tuesdays from 11 am to 12 pm at ESB 3125. Reach out to the group and Alexi at least 24 hours in advance if a member cannot attend the mandatory meeting. If we cannot reschedule, the missing member will be informed of the meeting's content. Partner meetings begin May 12th, mentor meetings with Alexi begin May 10th. During meetings, we will have two roles:
- Notetaker: taking meeting minutes
- Moderator / Timekeeper: making sure the meeting runs smoothly and all items receive respectable amount of time
All communication outside of the meetings will be through Slack, Element, email, and GitHub for ideas, suggestions, reviews and anything else related to teamwork. Slack will be used for communication tools for group gathering, scheduling meetings and discussions, and all informal communications. GitHub issues will be used for formal discussion about the project. Element will be used sparingly, when the team needs to communicate their progress to the partner.
The team will keep a constant stream of communication and updates within the group and with the mentor (Alexi) and partners to ensure the project is on the right track.
All team members are expected to work on the branch relevant to the feature they are working on and submit a pull request for their work on github.com. The main branch will be protected from merging pull requests until at least one approval has been granted. Members are expected to be reviewers of each other on pull requests. During regular working hours (9-5 pm), pull requests should be reviewed within 1-2 hours after creation. At that time, approving PRs should be a priority. Github notifications will be integrated into the Slack channel for easier visibility.
Between the structure of the Capstone requirements as a class and the contained nature of the project, it makes sense to have primarily a deadline-based setup.
Based on the progress and with larger milestones in mind, we will add specific deliverables on the weekly basis. The number of working hours each week should be used as a guideline but the overall goal is the set of deliverables itself. Group members are expected to complete the assigned work regardless of the hours required.
Based on prior experience in the program, the most likely breach of contract we anticipate is the failure to communicate the difficulty in meeting deadlines far enough in advance for the team to adjust, and the consequence of other team members having to do extra work overtime as a result.
If this comes up, we would up the frequency of check-ins and in-person meetings to ensure that the progress is being tracked consistently and that each team member has the necessary support to get through roadblocks throughout the project.