M1 Assignments

You will do quite a lot of web development in the lecture part of this class. Thus, this lab is not about web technology or development, but rather introduces you to three other topics related to web development: Usability, publishing on the web and devops and agile. As we start off with the web part this term I’ve decided to try a new approach: Rather than working on toy-assignments within a week, I ask you to learn about the theory now, and apply them to any project later during the term.

Assignment 1: Discount Usability Test

Conduct a Discount Usability Test within any project of your choice. Each one of you has to do either a user test, a heuristic evaluation or a paper prototype. You can team up to apply all three methods to the same project, e.g. the programming project you will be working on in the lecture during this term. But you can also do the Usability Test on/for any other project - your Bachelor Thesis, the software your company develops, combine it with your Independent Coursework, etc.

Assignment 2: Static Site Generators

I want to introduce you to the idea of static site generators for a way to publish - well, mostly static - content on the web. The second assignment is about doing this at least once, again with any project of your choice:

- your personal blog
- your personal web site
- your companies website
- a proof of concept for an maintenance-friendly web app for ...
- ...

Assignment 3. Agile Development and DevOps

Based on a lecture about agile development and continuous deployment, your assignment will be to move a project of your choice one step further towards agile and/or a continuous deployment pipeline. This may be setting up a CI/CD workflow for your M1 software project or any other project; introducing scrum or parts of scrum to your work in any other project, etc.

Write Up and Hand-Ins

For each of these three assignments, you need to hand in two parts:

1. A notice of intent a week after we finish the topic. The notice of intent is just a sentence or two, e.g. “I will do a heuristic evaluation of the software xy that I’ve developed last term/during my bachelor thesis/at work” for Assignment 1, Discount Usability Test.
2. A written Report committed as PDF to Moodle describing what you did, what worked well and not so well and what you learned, on something up to 5-6 pages at most. These Reports are due June 26, 2020 (one week before the examination period)

You may work on each of these assignments alone, or in a team up to three people. You may decide to work on and hand in a different topic than what you stated in your notice of intention. (I just want you to make a plan what you will or can do for the assignment early on. If you find something more interesting or worthwhile to do during the term, that’s perfectly fine.)