APPENDICES
Tools, setup, and the working vocabulary for this course.
The Fast-Start Workbench
Repository, board, hours log, and a place to run code — standing in under two hours on day one, including on a locked-down laptop with no administrator rights
Week 1 of an eight-week course cannot be spent installing things. This appendix gets the whole workbench up in a single sitting: a decision table keyed to the student's actual situation leads either to a browser-only path (a GitHub account plus a cloud development environment, nothing installed, no administrator rights) or to a local path for students who have the rights and the hardware. Then the four pieces every capstone needs regardless of stack — the repository and its structure, the project board wired to requirement identifiers, the hours log, and a diagramming tool whose output can go in a specification. Closes with a milestone-to-minimum-environment table, a free-tier watch list with a teardown checklist, and a verification pass that proves the workbench works before Week 1 ends.
The Fast-Start Catalog: Twelve Pre-Scoped Briefs
Twelve ready-to-build projects, each with a real problem, a named user, drafted starter requirements, the genuinely hard part, and a stack already sized to 160 hours
The engine of the whole accelerated edition, and the reason Week 1 ends with a decision instead of a shortlist. Twelve project briefs spanning web and mobile applications, data and analytics, applied AI, developer tooling, security, accessibility, civic and nonprofit software, and education technology. Each brief ships the problem and the person who has it, a minimum viable scope that plausibly fits 160 hours, eight to ten drafted functional requirements with acceptance criteria, four to six drafted non-functional requirements with measurable targets, the genuinely hard part that will eat the schedule, a suggested technology stack with the reasoning behind it, what to cut first if Week 4 says you are behind, and one way to make it more ambitious if you are ahead. Adopt one and adapt it, or bring your own project and use a brief as the template — either way the blank page is gone. Opens with how to choose in ninety minutes and closes with the adaptation rules that keep an inherited requirement from quietly describing somebody else's project.
The Document Kit
Every artifact this course requires, as a fill-in template and a worked example — with the bad version shown next to the good one
The reference opened every week, trimmed to exactly what eight weeks demands and no more. Each deliverable appears three times: a blank template to copy, a worked example from a Fast-Start brief carried all the way through, and a deliberately bad version annotated with what is wrong and what it costs. Covers the project charter and scoping decision, the requirements specification with its functional and non-functional halves, acceptance criteria, the architecture decision record, the work plan and risk register, the test plan, the defect report and log, the hours log, the README, the runbook, the handoff guide, the change log, and the retrospective. Where a template also ships as a starter file in a chapter's companion code, this appendix says which week hands it to you.
The Grading Contract
How the 50 / 25 / 15 / 10 split is earned in eight weeks, the full final rubric, the submission checklist, the week-by-week pace table, and the AI-use policy
No surprises in Week 8. The grading contract in full: the final implementation and its documentation at 50 percent with the complete rubric line by line and the evidence that earns each line, the six weekly milestones at 25 percent, the thirty-minute presentation at 10 percent with its own rubric, and the eight weekly quizzes at 15 percent. Includes the week-by-week pace table stating what must be done and roughly how many of the 160 hours should be spent by each Friday, the complete final submission checklist, the repository structure a grader expects, the AI-use and disclosure policy with the log format, the academic-integrity line, and a plain account of what falling one week behind costs in a course where one week is an eighth of the term — plus how the six milestones relate to the final grade, so nobody mistakes a weekly milestone for optional work.
Glossary
The vocabulary of the software development life cycle, project management, and delivery — in the sense this course uses it
Every term the course uses as a term of art, defined the way a practitioner means it and cross-referenced to the week that teaches it: acceptance criteria, architecture decision record, baseline, burn-down, change control, clean-machine test, definition of done, functional and non-functional requirement, MoSCoW, novelty load, regression, release candidate, risk register, severity versus priority, traceability matrix, vertical slice, walking skeleton, and work breakdown structure — along with the terms this edition adds: the Fast-Start brief, adopt-or-deviate, the two-thirds rule, and the halfway audit.