Software Engineering Showcase | Whakaaturanga Hanga Pūmanawa 2022

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SENG302 Project 2022

Product: LENSfolio

This year's application is part of an overarching ongoing project called the LENS project. The project is a group of modules that help SENG302 students with their learning. This year, SENG302 teams are building LENSfolio, a module that is part of LENS, that may be used by future SENG302 students. To reduce confusion between this year's students and future SENG302 students (who are the users of this application), we will, from here on, refer to the future SENG302 course with the fictitious course code SENG303.

A crucial but difficult part for SENG303 students is keeping track of everything that they have learnt. Furthermore, an important part of recalling what they have learnt is ensuring that there is evidence for what they have learnt (e.g., examples of work they have done). Ideally, they would be able to do this in some form of a portfolio, where they can link pieces of evidences to the skills they have learnt along the way.

To get the best out of learning in any project course, a student needs to think about all the skills they want to gain/improve by the end of the course and then work towards building these skills by doing work in that area. Reflecting on what they have done increases learning. Skills might be quantitative (formerly called hard skills) or qualitative (formerly called soft skills). The skills plus the evidence of work done for each skill is a student’s portfolio.

Qualitative example: A SENG303 student might enter the skill “team management” under the qualitative skills tab. Under that, they might list the types of things they could do within the context of the project (e.g., organise co-located sessions and book rooms, organise the wiki, creating and implementing a process within the team for tracking and prioritising issues each sprint, … ). Every time they do any of these activities, they can add a dated short description that will count as evidence.

Quantitative example: A student might enter the skill “Test driven development” under the quantitative skills tab. They can then collect evidence directly from the team’s code repository by searching and selecting the commits that apply. This might automatically get the commit date, commit number, and commit message and add it to the portfolio as evidence of this skill.

Service: Many organisations require their staff to spend time in service to the organisation or community. In the context of SENG303, a student might do something for the team, such as creating a short tutorial with some code on a new technology that the team will use. This might save the members of the team time and effort to source and learn this by themselves. In the “service” tab, the student could write this in their portfolio. Other team members could then upvote it or write comments under it. All of this counts as evidence in the portfolio.

LENSfolio is an online project planner and portfolio specifically designed for the needs of SENG303, a Software Engineering Project Course. SENG303 teaching staff will be able to create projects and assign students to teams. They can then add events, milestones, and deadlines for the project, and specify when each sprint begins and ends. Students can then log into the application, find evidences and link them to skills they have learnt.

This module has a lot more functionality that will be added to it over time and this will help SENG303 students, or future SENG302 students, have an even better learning experience.

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