THE MILESTONES
One project.
7 milestones, eight weeks.
You build one thing for eight weeks. Each milestone hands you the next piece of it — the charter, the requirements, the design and the skeleton, the build, the tests, the documentation and the release. Three tiers each: Normal, Medium, Hard.
P1 WEEKLY
Week 1 · Inception
Charter, Scoping Decision & Engineering System
"What does it cost to finish what you start?"
Why an accelerated capstone is won or lost in Week 1; the seven hats and the compressed life cycle; choosing from the Fast-Start Catalog of pre-scoped briefs (or bringing your own and using a brief as the template); sizing honestly to 160 hours; and standing up the repository, board, and hours log on day one→
P2 WEEKLY
Week 2 · Requirements
Software Requirements Specification
"What makes a word trustworthy?"
Adapting a brief's starter requirements instead of writing from a blank page; the anatomy of a functional requirement and its acceptance criteria; making non-functional requirements measurable in the same week rather than a later one; MoSCoW and the discipline of writing down what you will not build; traceability and a definition of done→
P3 WEEKLY
Week 3 · Design
Technical Specification, Decision Records & Walking Skeleton
"Why lay a foundation before you decorate?"
The week that buys the rest of the term: adopting or deviating from the brief's suggested stack and defending it in an architecture decision record; a technical specification sized to eight weeks; the work plan and risk register; and a walking skeleton running end to end under continuous integration before Week 4→
P5 WEEKLY
Week 5 · Construction
Core Increment & Demo
"Whose work is it when a machine helps you?"
The developer hat at full speed: vertical slices against the Must list, a per-task definition of done, reviewing your own code, AI-assisted implementation with real accountability, commit discipline under deadline pressure, and keeping the hours log honest in the week you are least inclined to→
P6 WEEKLY
Week 6 · Verification
Tested Release Candidate, Defect Log & Change Log
"Why does an honest builder look for his own faults?"
Verification as a phase rather than an afterthought: the test plan, test cases traced to requirements, defect reporting and triage by severity and priority; then integration, performance against your own targets, a security pass, and the change control that decides honestly what ships and what does not→
P7 WEEKLY
Week 7 · Transition
Documentation Set, Deployable Release & Handoff Package
"What does it mean to entrust your work to another?"
The week that carries most of the grade: the README that gets a stranger running, the architecture overview, the runbook, the handoff guide, configuration and secrets, a scripted or containerized setup, the tagged release and its license — and the clean-machine test that proves any of it works→
P8 FINAL
Week 8 · Delivery
The Final Submission
"What makes work finished?"
Closing the project: the final submission audited against the rubric from a clean clone, the tagged release and the repository link, a thirty-minute presentation that tells the truth about what did and did not get done, and the retrospective that turns eight compressed weeks into something you can carry into an interview→