Iterating on your Project Proposal, develop a comprehensive project plan, a map of the work you will undertake for the rest of the semester. You've had some time to sit with your original proposed scope of work. Your ideas have evolved while developing project-specific deliverables, a lightweight prototype, and a preliminary user study. Use this basis to refine your plan for the rest of the semester.
A key aspect of the project plan is scope. Be ambitious and realistic at the same time. Push yourself, but make sure you are specifying a practical scope of work that will form the basis of a true functional prototype and evaluation.
You will run a user study with this prototype. The study must be meaningful. This means, for example, that you cannot build a game or social network project that requires thousands of participants. Scope your project to the scale of the resources that you can practially access.
In your project plan, specify:- Roles: decide how to split the project up into distinct portions, each of which will be assigned to a member of your team.
For each role, specify:
- Name of the role
- Descrption of role
- Name of the person who wil play the role
- Qualifications, including background and interests, of this person.
- Process: how will you manage the project? When and how will you meet? How will you represent your process? How will you record decisions? How will you maintain code?
- Schedule of tasks: Break down the project into clearly identified sub-tasks, analyze dependencies among them, identify critical paths, and design a feasible schedule for accomplishing these tasks. Put time along the X-axis, at the top. Put tasks, sub-tasks, and deliverables along the Y-axis, on the left. Draw lines that identify the time periods for each sub-task. Decide who is doing what. Carefully consider dependencies and integration points as you plan and represent who is doing what, and when.