Content of the Seminars

The aim of the seminars is to practice on the basis of the content seen during the Java Enterprise PA165 lectures. In each seminar, there will be one/more  tutorial/exercise that students can follow by applying the concepts seen during the lecture, getting some practical insights with the possibility to discuss about the implemented solution. A rough schedule for one seminar group is the following (variations may happen depending on the seminar's topic):

1. The seminar tutor introduces the topic seen during the lecture;
2. The seminar tutor explains the assignment;
3. Students work independently on the assignment;

Furthermore, each student will be part of a project composed by 4 students that will be developed outside from seminar teaching hours. Each team will be assigned one project description with general requirements (context, entities that should be included, etc...). During the semester, students will receive assignments for milestones to be completed given the initial requirements. For example, one milestone might involve the creation of the system's persistence layer.

Attendance

Please note that attendance to the seminars is mandatory starting from the 3rd week. Each student can have one unexcused absence during the semester. 

Project Evaluation

The project will be evaluated according to several milestones and a final project defence. The idea is that students will progress with the implementation, providing increments according to description given in the project milestones requirements. Overall, a student can be awarded 55 points for the project including the final presentation defence;

The 55 points for the project can be collected in the following way:

• 45 points during the three major projects milestones (15 points the 1st milestone + 15 points the 2nd + 15 points the 3rd). The 15 points for each milestone are awarded taking into account:
  • up to 10 points will be assigned to each team based on the reviews that other students will write about the project. Every student will have a randomly assigned project to review by the tutor, different for every milestone. The review will need to discuss the project quality, considering aspects such as: the build process (if the project can be successfully built - given the requirements for the milestone), the overall quality of modules from the design point of view, code quality, quality of tests, issues and bugs present in the release.
    Each student will use the predefined template available in the seminar groups interactive syllabus. The seminar tutor will have the final decision on the points to assign to a team based on all the project reviews that are submitted. It can happen that a seminar tutor evaluates some reviews as not reliable and decides to override completely the score (either in positive or negative terms);
  • up to 5 points will be assigned to the student based on the quality of the written report and realistic evaluation of the project under review;
• 10 points for the final project delivery and project defence. Instructions for the final defence with the final requirements are given several weeks before the final presentations (usually held at the beginning of January);

Bonus Points:

For really excellent submissions, there will be the possibility to assign bonuses:

• 1 point max for one milestone;
• max 3 points during the final defence;

Penalty Points

Given the requirements for a milestone, teams that do not deliver a working solution for one milestone will get 0 points out of 10 for the project part (the team can still get points for the review of other projects).

Unbalanced Effort by Team Members

Given that the projects are formed by 4 team members, there might be the case that some students are not contributing to the project. The reviews should mention whether the effort of the evaluated project was balanced. In case the seminar tutor detects unbalanced effort, he may decide to:

• lower the overall project score for the whole team;
• redistribute the points from the under-performing students to the one(s) carrying out the work;
• in extreme cases, exclude the student from the group and course;

Remember that part of the project deals with team-work management: your seminar tutor can help you not only on technical aspects. Do not wait the final defence to discuss with your seminar tutor about problems within your team.

FAQs:

Can I get exception to enroll the course?
The demand for the course is big. We do not grant exceptions in these cases:

• Its your compulsory option for your field of study
• You really want to take the course

Students must follow the university process. That means you will have to wait and hopefully some students will drop their enrollment during the second or third week (very often a certain number of students leaves the course third week of the semester)

Can I have cross-seminar team?
No. The teams must consist of people in same seminar group. All of the students must be present during milestone evaluation.

Can I get exception to enroll a specific seminar group? I can bring my notebook.
No, we do not grant exceptions to enroll specific seminar groups. Each seminar group has been designed to accommodate 24 or 28 students - that is a number that one seminar tutor can follow. Bringing more people will mean more difficulties in getting the feedback.

Can we have a team of 3 people? Can we have a team of 5 people?
No. The team must consist of exactly 4 people.

My project works on my laptop in my NetBeans. Why did you penalized us in milestone evaluation for not-buildable project?
Every project at every milestone must be buildable and testable by Maven 3 from command line on both Windows and Linux. This is one of the main properties of a well developed enterprise application.