FIT2001 The POD blog

Lecturer briefing week 12

2011-05-21T15:34:00.003+10:00

Lecturer briefing week 11

2011-05-15T17:45:00.002+10:00

Assignment 3 marking guide

2011-05-12T13:17:00.000+10:00

Assignment 3 was pretty popular as assignment - around 140 submitted. I really think it has changed the ability of the students to do sequence diagrams - at least the ones who did it - be interesting if that improvement shows up on the exam. Looking ahead I expect assignment 4 to very popular. Not so sure about 5 - don't think there will be so many of them. Just keep that in mind when planning how much time to allocate for marking.

For assignment 3 pretty follow the same general advice I gave for assignment 1 and 2 (and will again for 4 and 5). That was:

General Approach to Marking

I haven't got a complex rubic to follow - nor this time do I have a spreadsheet to auto-process the grade (as I have in the past). Hopefully, you'll find them - and the other assignments easy to mark. The two things I'd like you to concentrate on are to be consistent and to give as much constructive feedback as you can.

Consistency

I'm not worried about whether or not you are consistent with other tutors or other tutors on other campuses - I can look for differences between markers and campuses - but be consistent within the ones you mark. Mark them all the same way and to the same standard. If you turn out to mark harder or easier then another tutor - I can adjust - but that will only work if you are consistent within the assignments you mark.

Feedback

I know you all try to give as much useful feedback as possible, and its a little redundant me saying this - but I will anyway :-). The aim of the assignments isn't really to test the ability of the students, the exam does that. The main aim is to give them an exercise that is big enough to put them under a bit of pressure - so that they have to learn and extend their skill base. All the assignments in the unit are really used to teach rather than assess. That only works - of course - when there is good feedback - that lets the students know when they have mastered an idea of skill, or how they can improve next time they have the same sort of problem. Do whatever you like to make sure you give good feedback - and try hard to give it as soon as you can. For most that will mean making comments in the 'grading' feedback box on Moodle, but if that isn't productive for you or doesn't suit your style, find a way that does. That might be email, or meeting with some (or all) your students - even if that happens in a tutorial. I - because I'm old :-), print off the assignments, write all over them then scan them (we have a photocopier here that scans), then I upload the scanned document with my hand-written comments up on Moodle. That might work for you too. Anyway, give the best feedback you can as quickly as you can.

Assessment criteria for assignment 3

The students already know the areas we are going to look at when assessing assignment 2. They are:

General aspects

Format, presentation standard and completeness of report
Clarity of writing
Appropriateness of each report section
Model descriptions and presentation

System Models

Completeness with respect to functionality (Do the sequence diagrams represent the use cases accurately? Will they work)
Conformance to standard diagramming conventions and rules (Are the diagrams really UML? Are design aspects - types, visibility, steorotypes - shown on the class diagram?)
Consistency between sequence diagrams and class models and package diagram (Have all the methods on the sequence diagram been included on the class diagram? Does the class diagram show all the classes? Does the package diagram show all the classes?)

Roughly allocate 20% for the general ascpects of the submission and 80% to the system models. Each sub-point is of equal weight. Feel free to fudge those weighting a little if somebody has done and outstanding job of one aspect but messed up another and in your mind deserves more (or less) that the 40/60 split provides.

Rubric for assessment

Use the same general apporach to assessing each aspect of each submission that we used for assignment 1. That was:

To determine what gets HD, D, C, P and N use the following as a guide when thinking about each of the points 1 through 5 above.

HD - it is hard to find anything the students could do to improve. The few negative things you find are minor and have no real impact on the this aspect of the submission.

D - there are a few areas for improvement, however, it is clear the students understand what they have done. The few problems have effected the overall quality of the report or model but are easily overcome.

C - There are a number of areas that can be better. It will take a reasonable amount of rework to fix these flaws. The overall report or model suffers as a result.

P - There some major issues. It’s not clear that the students understand the purpose of the report/ report section/ model, or some major component has been left out that makes you wonder if the students have an understanding of what’s required in this area. Major rework would be required to correct the problems.

N - This aspect of the submission is unacceptable. Major rework is required. The students have not demonstrated a basic understanding of what is required. Before the group moves to the next stage of the project this part of the report will need to be redone.

Again in terms of benchmark examples and grade distribution, the same advice we followed for assignment 1 applies.

Examples

One of the great things about marking on-line is you can have a look at what others have done. So if you are looking for examples to judge your assignments against, poke around Moodle and see other assignments - a nice way of calibrating yourself and getting ideas. David Grant - my UML goto guy :-) - plans to mark a good selection quickly and early so feel free to have a look at the assignments we have marked.

Distribution

Not looking for any particular shape or pattern to the grades. I do expect ... and hope ... that most of the assignments will be of a high standard, so don't panic if as you mark you feel like you are heading to a high average score. That's fine (or low for that matter, just I think they will do well). Focus on being consistent.

Once again good luck!

POD

Notes for tutors weeks 10, 11 and 12.

2011-05-11T09:36:00.002+10:00

Last post - might as well roll them all into one.

Week 10 is a new and significant week - on testing. The workshop exercises give the students a chance to practice making test cases using a process covered in lectures. It's based on a paper by an IBMer - one the web and linked to the exercise so the students can refer to it in more detail.

The first exercise works through the example presented in that paper - it's a quite a large problem. Maybe after the students have identified the list of scenarios to be tested, allocate a scenario to different students, so they get one each, rather than being overwhelmed by the lot.

Mind you being overwhelmed isn't too bad - at least they'll understand how methodical (tedious?) good testing is :-).

The next exercise isn't so large, and should be easy enough for them to do on their own.

This is then followed by a NetBeans tutorial showing how JUnit works. JUnit would have been mentioned in FIT1002. It's featured in both the SJB and RS texts in their coverage of testing. The aim of this exercise, its just to give them a taste of the technology that is the foundation of automated testing (and the design concepts - test classes - that make it work.)

Then a short video showing a more advanced automated tool - Selenium. There are others, but this video shows how it works - with a silly example - in just a few minutes. Automated testing is also covered in the lecture but get the class to discuss the pros and cons. Hopefully, having a feel for the painstaking and repetitive nature of developing test cases will give them a feel for the value of automated tools - esp. if tests are going to be run and rerun several times.

Then to finish more test cases, with an exercise out of the book. Hopefully, they will have the idea by now, and even through there are a lot of possible paths they should be good now at making good test cases. Perhaps talk to them about test cases and what makes them good or bad. If they are bored, then again you might split the scenarios to be test up among the students.

Depends on your class, but things might fill the two hours and not be covered. that's OK, you can spill a little into the next week - which is a discussion and as a result quite flexible.

Week 11 - The same tutorial we used to run in week 3. In lectures we are covering requirements gathering. Covering it late rather than early. When its early it hasn't worked so well as its a bit abstract - now I hope - it will have occurred to them that they really do need to get requirements from somewhere - and that they are important, so the material covered will hopefully seem to them to be more relevant. In any case, we are doing the "Gladwell" tutorial - which often went really well anyway - most of you should be old hands at running this tutorial, and those of you who aren't - you'll love the video we are going to watch which features Malcom Gladwell talking really well about how complex it is to ask people even simple questions. It is quiet thought provoking and a lot of fun.

Week 12 - Last week. Phew. Spend some time talking to your class about the exam. The structure is the same as in the past - obvious the content reflects the "new" unit but past exam papers are a good way of getting a feel for what's expected. Make sure they see the exam information page on Moodle - show them the blog discussion page too, make sure they see how great some of the blogs of students are as a revision tool. Encourage them to form study groups etc. ... all the usual advice.

This chat about the exam in the tutorial is pretty important now - as we aren't supposed to do it in the week 12 lecture!

Some very concrete advice about the exam. Part C has changed a little. Still get a case study, still draw a class diagram (analysis), still draw a use case model and have to draw a narrative. However, they no longer have to remember the format for the "template" to use for a narrative. Question 3.4 where they draw a sequence diagram includes a narrative, they should use that template for question 3.3. And there is now a question 3.5 where they have to make test cases - for the use case in question 3.4. All changes for the better, but good to make sure they are aware of them.

POD

Lecturer briefing week 10

2011-05-08T21:35:00.002+10:00

Lecturer briefing week 9

2011-04-29T14:15:00.003+10:00

Notes for tutors - week 9

2011-04-29T14:11:00.002+10:00

This week another fairly orthodox set of exercises - very similar to a past tutorial - on the conversion of domain diagrams to relational database tables. The handout has the same text on it as in the past - describing the process - and a some exercises - a few more than in the past.

You might need to just talk about the process at the start of the tut. as this process isn't being covered in the lectures ... not that it's hard ... they don't need to do it this year in assignments, but do emphasise that fact its 1) easy, and 2) important to be able to do :-).

As usual, the solutions are in the Moodle file area, and will be made available to the students by the end of the week.

POD

Assignment 2 marking guide

2011-04-21T16:53:00.004+10:00

Assignment 2 wasn't as popular as assignment 1 - around 120 submitted - so expect not to have to mark as many :-)

For assignment 2 pretty follow the same general advice I gave for assignment 1. That was:

General Approach to Marking

Consistency

Feedback

Assessment criteria for assignment 2

The students already know the areas we are going to look at when assessing assignment 2. They are:

General aspects

Format, presentation standard and completeness of report
Clarity of writing
Appropriateness of each report section
Problem/solution identification descriptions

System Models

Completeness with respect to business functionality
Conformance to standard diagramming conventions and rules
Consistency between use case and class models

Roughly allocate 40% for the general ascpects of the submission and 60% to the system models. Each sub-point is of equal weight. Feel free to fudge those wiethting a little if somebody has done and outstanding job of one aspect but messed up another and in your mind deserves more (or less) that the 40/60 split provides.

To help assess the submissions - well the models anyway - there is a sample solution from the text we can use - that's in the assignments folder on Moodle (in the files section). I will make that available to students shortly - once we are past the dates when extensions and late submissions won't be made.

Rubric for assessment

HD - it is hard to find anything the students could do to improve. The few negative things you find are minor and have no real impact on the this aspect of the submission.

C - There are a number of areas that can be better. It will take a reasonable amount of rework to fix these flaws. The overall report or model suffers as a result.

Again in terms of benchmark examples and grade distribution, the same advice we followed for assignment 1 applies.

Examples

One of the great things about marking on-line is you can have a look at what others have done. So if you are looking for examples to judge your assignments against, poke around Moodle and see other assignments - a nice way of calibrating yourself and getting ideas. David Grant and I will mark ours quickly and early so feel free to have a look at the assignments we have marked. Early in the week I'll post links to exemplar assignments.

Distribution

Once again good luck!

POD

Notes for tutors - week 8

2011-04-15T23:32:00.002+10:00

Back into some UML this week - use case realisation.

It's a very similar tutorial to the tutorial we have run in the past on use case realisation. The only differences are the addition of robustness diagrams and an extra problem to work on.

Robustness diagrams will be new to some of you, but they are pretty easy, kind of an abbreviated form of communication diagram. They are covered in chapter 5 of the RS text (see chapter 8 of that text for their take on sequence diagrams too if you need). If you want a short, and very pragmatic, guide to robustness diagrams and robustness analysis see Scott Ambler's great little essay: http://www.agilemodeling.com/artifacts/robustnessDiagram.htm.

The aim of the diagrams - and the reason why I put them in the exercise before the first-cut sequence diagram - is kind of a mental warm up for the creating of a sequence diagram. I hope they will make sequence diagrams a little easier to learn - but they should help in each particular case by sort of providing an overview of the use case that is being modelled.

The students then - for two case study use cases out of the SJB text - work of a first-cut sequence diagram, then a three-layer sequence diagram, then updating the class diagram with design details.

It's important that the students get the idea - if not mastery of the technique of sequence diagraming and the relationship of the sequence diagrams to design class diagrams. This - of course - is covered in the lecture for this week, but it's easy to listen to, and hard to do. If at the end of the tut, they need more, remind them that there are plenty of exercises in the back of the text for them to keep working on.

Assignment 3 is all about sequence diagrams and design class diagrams. There is an exam question - as in past years - that asks them to draw a first-cut sequence diagram.

I'm not fussed with the order you run the tut. I get my students to all work together on the same problem and same part - and at each stage get one of them to pop up the front and work through their solution. You might do that, or just let them work on their own at their own pace - or some combination of those two extremes. Do what will work best for your students.

Again, encourage them to try to use VP for UML for the sequence diagramming, some will love that, others will prefer to do it on paper - it's learning the technique that matters as always, encourage them to try but don;t force the issue.

I haven't posted the solution yet (it's Friday night right now), I have to work on my solutions for the two robustness diagrams. I'll get that done over the week end so you'll see that in Moodle shortly (and released to the students at the end of the week.)

Just a quick look ahead - many of the coming week of tutorials are strongly based on the tutorials we have run in the past (the Gladwell video for example). However, the week on testing will be based around a tutorial on testing with NetBeans. I'm hoping that will prove to be straight forward for us, but in case you want a have a look you'll find the tutorial I'm to adapt at: http://netbeans.org/kb/docs/java/junit-intro.html (Note the RS text will be the basis of the lecture that week and it features examples with JUnit).

POD

Lecturer briefing for week 8.

2011-04-12T10:39:00.002+10:00

Feel like I'm rambling a bit in this one. Hope it still helps.

Notes for tutors - week 7

2011-04-09T15:17:00.007+10:00

This week some exercises but they mainly for the trigger for class discussion. For 2001 veterans, the tutorial is pretty much the one we used to do in week 8 with a couple of new questions. The new questions pick up on the old theme but just give it a bit more direction and focus (I hope :-) ).

Given the amazing systems failure this week at Monash, feel free at some stage in the tutorials- given that its relevant to bring that into the discussion. The only problem is there isn't a lot of information about what actually happened. Still at a high level - Monash has done a lot of consolidation of hardware into a data centre - in-line with industry practice - and that did create a single point of failure.

Also, if you feel your group need more hands exercises doing UML use cases, curtail or drop the discussion and give them some more tasks to do on modelling from the text, Check how they are progressing on assignment 2. Double check they understand which models have to be in the assignment (use case and domain class model).

Comments about each question.

Exercise 1:

These are good example of a quite well designed systems, from a functional point of view - except the main times the system is going to be used is under extreme load and then it fails. Could be the network, the server and disk capacity etc. rather than software failure. These could be upgraded - but at what cost - often peak demand is many orders of magnitude higher than normal demand. This is hard to anticipate and to design for. Some "cloud" computing vendors are offering hosting services that scale during peak times, but there is no elegant solution to this problem. System testing must have also failed in this case - probably didn’t test the system under extreme load.

Exercise 2:

Bit of a nuisance that most sites have turned off reporting up-time, still let them mess around for a while, its still fn and interesting and then turn their attention to the screen grab of the telsta.com up-time graph. Overall, a good fun way of showing that the way we avoid downtime - in hardware terms anyway - in IT is through redundancy and over-engineering. Simple cheap and effective. Ask them if they know what RAID disk is? Why do computer rooms have two air conditioners? etc to help make the point.

Probably a good place to talk about last week's Monash melt-down.

Exercise 3:

This exercise is right out of another text - but a good illustration of the same principle. It's great that a lot of the transaction numbers are included in the blurb. Get them to think about the many situations when transaction numbers are seasonal - retail sales, sports events, weather, semesters etc.

Exercise 4:

In the last few years many organisations have been thinking about not owning their own hardware - just a chance to get them to read about that - this is a great solution to the issue of seasonal or ad hoc requirements for extra hardware - just rent it for a while from a cloud vendor. If you aren't "up" on the latest market offerings, a quick way of understanding the value proposition is to look on the web for press-releases/sales guff about IBM's support of the 4 tennis opens. Basically the same hardware and software solution used by all of them - the share it and rent it, but each only requires massive resources for a few weeks a year. Saves them owning that much capacity which would for most of the year be wasted.

Monash's gmail is pretty typical of the way many organisations are approaching this - "safe" infrastructure applications being outsourced. Many not so keen to put core systems in the cloud. That may change ... and for small and medium companies, offerings like salesforce.com (along with Google Apps, the marque SaaS offering) are compelling.

Exercise 5:

Follows on - and looks at that issue of why many orgs. aren't putting core apps in the cloud. Here is an article about SAP that has some technical points that are relevant. Many less technical arguments too - security, trust, etc.

http://www.informationweek.com/news/services/saas/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=212701383

Other exercises:

These are right out of the text. I'll post answers for the students at the end of the week. Like other weeks, maybe get them to work on the same problem as a class, then when most are done discuss it as a class before moving onto the next. If you need help, check the text!, but also my e-mail which has a URL for you to get the solutions before I post them.

Again, if you need more for yourself - or if you have time in class - this video of Scott Morrison (from cloud vendor Layer 7) provides a nice overview of the value proposition of cloud computing - he's talking to an audience of SAP BI professionals so that's his focus but his general stuff - at the start about the cloud is easy to digest and very well presented (and yes that is me introducing him).

1645 K Scott Morrison from The Eventful Group on Vimeo.

POD

Assignment 1 marking guide

2011-04-04T19:43:00.007+10:00

Phew, time to mark assignment 1. Lots of submissions (253 at the moment) - that about half the students. Remember the assignments are optional, so when you work through your tutorial list don't panic if some of the students haven't submitted. I expect the choice of assignment will be very peer influenced so the % who have chosen a particular assignment might vary a lot from tutorial to tutorial.

General Approach to Marking

Consistency

Feedback

Assessment criteria for assignment 1

The students already know the areas we are going to look at when assessing assignment 1. They are:

the quality of the interface design,
the quality of the storyboard (interface flow diagram),
the quality of the menu design and
the consistency and completeness of the working prototype (and initial domain model).
The professionalism of the submission and supporting documentation will also be considered.

Allocate 10% to each points 1, 2 and 3 and 45% to point 4 and 25% to point 5.

When looking at points 1, 2 and 3 (the actual screens), look for evidence that the students have designed the interface with the kind of principles covered in the lectures in mind. Hopefully, the have :-), its especially easy if they used a GUI prototyping tool to make the screens - making alignment of the visual elements and consistency - for example - much easier. Keep in mind any set of guidelines while marking, but perhaps the elements of Nielsen's simple definition of usability is the best to keep in mind: learnability, memorability, efficiency, errors and satisfaction. They will provide good "shape" for the feedback you give.

For point 4, make sure the models make sense, nothing is missing - screens designed but unreachable, on the storyboard left out but not designed - that sort of thing. (Esp. look to make sure CRUD for all the elements of the domain model). I guess the main thing for point 4 is to think about whether or not the system will work - and whether the models - as a whole - capture that. It's brilliant if they have included a working prototype. Doesn't have to be complete, but showing the main function (submitting and reviewing a change request). If they haven't done that, it's still possible for them to do a good job of describing how it will work but I think it's much harder to convey. Don't panic too much if they haven't followed the RS text's protocol for an initial domain model - give them feedback about that - but don't mark harshly if they have added details and model elements that they shouldn't have - focus on the class they have included. Expect to see a lot of variation, expect also to see some over modelling - classes that really are attributes - the kind of mistakes inexperienced modellers make - help them with that via feedback as much as you can.

If you have any trouble getting any of the "system" to run because the student has used some exotic file format, contact the student and ask them to "demo" the prototype to you - perhaps in a tutorial.

For point 5 - look at the structure of the report, it's presentation and the actual writing (looking at spelling and grammar) and meaning. Esp. focus on whether the report is suitable for a non-technical audience. Reward any attempts that the students make to explain technical terms and the models (maybe we'll see a glossary or two!).

Rubric for assessment

To determine what gets HD, D, C, P and N use the following as a guide when thinking about each of the points 1 through 5 above.

HD - it is hard to find anything the students could do to improve. The few negative things you find are minor and have no real impact on the this aspect of the submission.

C - There are a number of areas that can be better. It will take a reasonable amount of rework to fix these flaws. The overall report or model suffers as a result.

Model solution

David Grant has prepared a "model" initial domain model for us to use as a template for marking. I'll get him to upload it to this blog post as a comment. We thought about doing the same for the interface, but figured that wouldn't be useful as there are some many different ways the interface might be presented that it would be impossible to do that well.

Examples

One of the great things about marking on-line is you can have a look at what others have done. So if you are looking for examples to judge your assignments against, poke around Moodle and see other assignments - a nice way of calibrating yourself and getting ideas. David Grant and I will mark ours quickly and early so feel free to have a look at the assignments we have marked. Early in the week I'll post links to exemplar assignments.

Distribution

Good luck!

POD

Lecturer briefing for week 7.

2011-04-04T16:54:00.002+10:00

Pretty straight forward this week - same lecture with only minor changes - that we used to have in week 8.

Tutor notes for week 6

2011-04-03T19:56:00.002+10:00

Very traditional tutorial this week - a series of exercises right out of the text book to give them practice at use case diagrams, activity diagrams and system sequence diagrams. Make sure they all focus on use case diagrams.

Each "set" of questions starts with a problem that they have to reproduce in VP for UML, just to give them practice at drawing that particular type of diagram with the tool. Up to you - and or them - from then on whether they use the tool or just work on paper for the problems that they have to figure out themselves.

Run the tut how it suits you - whether they work at their own pace, or you keep the class all on the same problem - you are in the best place to judge how what's best for your group.

If you need solutions they are in the tutorial folder on Moodle. I'll make them available to the students at the end of the week. The problems are the same ones (with one new one) that we used to work on in the week 6/7 tutorial in the past.

POD

Lecturer briefing for week 6.

2011-03-28T19:54:00.002+11:00

Notes for tutors - week 5

2011-03-27T10:56:00.002+11:00

A new tutorial for us this week. But - provided you have read the material from the library's usability study - it should go smoothly and be a lot of fun. Other than setting them up - into pairs of threes (threes will actually be OK as as facilitator is hard to make notes and watch and facilitate - a third person could act as observer/note taker) and getting them started on their own version of the facilitators script and tasks - the only major thing for you to manage is the discussion at the end.

On the tutorial description I included some points for discussion, they - I hope will help - make some notes yourself about what you see the class doing while they are conducting the test - these might come in handy if the discussion stalls - you can ask the people involved to comment on what you saw.

Just a note - the library has changed their catalogue system - both the interface and the search engine are new - since the 2005 study. The new system has a lot of neat features - but I'm not sure that the interface make it all that obvious what's what - so it will be interesting to see what the results are.

POD

P.S. In the next few weeks - back to traditional out of the text exercises - from SJB - on use cases and on design.

Lecturer briefing for week 5.

2011-03-22T10:46:00.002+11:00

Notes for tutors - week 4

2011-03-18T12:25:00.002+11:00

Week 2 of our 3 weeks on interface design. Again, just a reminder that next week we will redo the usability test the Library conducted in 2005. You will need to be familiar with the material the Library used to conduct that test. I know I mentioned it last week - and I don't mean to be too much of a pain :-), but do make sure you have read the material before next week It's all here: http://www.lib.monash.edu.au/reports/catalogue2005/

This weeks tutorial exercise involves an examination of some interfaces. The tasks are from one of the standard texts in the area - lots of background material has been provided - taken from other texts. All are referenced and linked in the pdf to the original so there's plenty to read if you - or they - need more material. The idea to to give them some ideas about how to evaluate interfaces and at the same time think about the principles and rules that are used to guide interface design.

You might need to work hard to keep them engaged - as there is so much to read - that might be off-putting - so keep an eye out for that. Maybe make the class work through the tasks one at a time, and at the end have a class discussion of what everybody thought.

The main tasks are:

Carry out a usability inspection of the Web site for Amazon.com. Using the [table above, showing Nielsen’s suggested evaluation heuristics] as a model, play the role of a usability expert working from Nielsen's guidelines. Scope the analysis by first choosing two concrete tasks (e.g., finding a particular product), and then identify usability problems associated with each task. Be sure to describe the tasks you focused on along with the problems that you identify.

As they are working on this check the concrete tasks they have chosen are reasonable - finding a book, checking delivery times etc. Amazon - of course - is a great site and has few problems. If they find it hard to critique in a negative way - maybe get them to look at a different site - I personally think the new Myer site http://www.myfind.com/ has a lot of problems. That's an alternative that might be fun to use, or fun to add as a second site to critique - esp. in comparison to Amazon's site.

[Think about] the problem of recruiting representative users for a usability test of a Java development environment. Suggest some strategies you might use to address these problems. What would you do if you could not recruit expert Java programmers?

Next week we won't have "real" users but they'll that for the library, recruiting participants was a big deal. I figure they all know something about Java and Java development - and if they don't remind them of the week 1 NetBeans exercise - so they should be able to do a good job of this - and as a result it will provide a good basis for discussing issues around what a "representative" group of users is - maybe once they have done this think back to how Amazon or myfind.com would define "representative users"

Think back over your last few weeks of surfing the Web. Can you remember any episodes that you would report as "critical incidents"? If so, what makes them critical? If you can't remember any, interview friends and see what they remember.

Get the class to share "incidents". The "background" reading warns not to take self-report incidents at face value - get them to discuss that - what about their own incidents? How should they be interpreted?

There are also some extra tasks - rather like last week - just looking at some of the software tools that can be used for GUI prototype creation.

POD

Notes for tutors - week 3

2011-03-11T13:36:00.008+11:00

The start of a few weeks on interface design.

This week's is strongly based on the tutorial we used to do in week 11, so for everybody who's done the unit before it should be very comfortable material for you. Just a head's up, next week is pretty standard, but the week after we'll get them to replicate a usability test performed by the Library in 2005. That was at a time when the Library upgraded their catalog. They put all the materials they used when they did usability testing up on the web - it's an awesome resource and we are going to reuse it - and luckily for us they have a new catalog system - and lots of people (me included) like the old one better. So in week 5 we'll redo the usability test - we should get some very interesting results. Obviously more on that later, but for now you might like to have a look at the material the library has made available about their 2005 testing program. It's all here: http://www.lib.monash.edu.au/reports/catalogue2005/

Exercise (1):

Many of the differences are obvious - a nice search box, better style, less graphics, alt text, meta tags etc. and most importantly consistency.

Archive.org preserves old links, see how the style (of any web site) has changed in the past - now its much more consistent. Discuss how the they use the Monash site - do they ﬁnd it useful? Who are the users? How does having such a broad range of users make design difﬁcult.

Let them explore archive.org a little - it's a lot of fun!

Exercise (2):

As always Nielsen has an interesting article on his site: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/ia-mistakes.html. After letting the students explore his site for a while why not use that article for a discussion.

Exercise (3): and Exercise (4):

These are basic exercises and fairly straight forward. Main thing is to make sure they understand how to sketch screens and also map the interaction from one screen to another. They have to be able to do that for assignment 1.

Exercises using MockFlow.

Mockflow is just on of the many tools that can be used to make GUI prototypes. We'll continue exploring this kind of tool next week. They are all OK and quite easy to learn. Make sure before your class you have looked at the samples and help - so you'll be able to answer any questions - not so much by directly showing what to click and where - but by pointing them to the resources so they can see for themselves - unless they are totally lost, which I hope is unlikey as the tool is pretty easy to pick up.

POD

Notes for tutors - week 2

2011-03-06T15:08:00.002+11:00

Week 2 already. Seems - from my reading of blogs - that the unit has started well. Thanks, and well done everybody.

The set of exercises for week 2 - all about class modelling - represent a pretty standard tutorial. You can run it how you think is best for you and your class - up to you if you have everybody working at their own pace, or you can get all of the class to work on the same problem, finish it, debrief comparing answers before moving onto the next one. If you do that, maybe get a student or two to stand up and present their answers to the class.

The only place where it gets tricky(ish?) is exercise 5 and 6 which I ask the students to use VP for UML. If you are using a different case tool on your campus, you'll already know that. VP for UML should already be installed in the labs, but if it's not - as it's a Java app - it should be easy enough for the students to install themselves.

As in the past, we've taken a fairly relaxed approach to introducing VP for UML. I figure if they are shown the basics they'll learn the tool fairly quickly. The first VP for UML exercise is simply reproducing a diagram they already have - to help them work out the mechanics of using the tool. The next exercise they have to work out for themselves. Encourage them to not work on paper first, to see at least, if they can think while using the tool. Some can, some can't, but good to try.

Hopefully, they will see the similarities between UML class models and ER models. If they don't point it out to them :-)

Talk a bit towards the end about the relevance of these exercises to the assignments - assignment 1 and 2 require class modelling.

At the end of the week I'll post solutions for the students to access on Moodle. You can get them in the mean time if you need them. Follow the "File" folder in the Admin tab of Moodle. If you can't find that, just let me know and I can email the file to you.

Enjoy, (let me know if there is anything I can do to help)

POD

Tutor notes for week 1.

2011-02-27T11:35:00.003+11:00

Hello Tutors!

I'm sure you have already had a chat with your campus lecturers. Many of you have done FIT2001 before - so welcome back.

The unit has changed a bit, but you'll find it similar to what we have done in the past. Just more of a focus on the GUI, on agile development and no coverage of structured methods.

The first tutorial should be an easy one for you. Kind of fun and hopefully interesting for the students but not a big deal if - as is often the case - a lot of students miss the first week. The exercise is pretty self contained - meaning that you won't have to do much hand-holding, and if students miss it they can catch up on their own.

You can get the details of the exercise off the Moodle web site (http://moodle.monash.edu/mod/resource/view.php?id=61282). It goes without saying that you need access to the unit web site. If you don't have it let your lecturer (and me) know right away.

The exercise won't take too long. That will mean you can take some time at the front to let the class get to know you and one another. Run that how you want. See if they have any questions about the unit. Emphasize the need to get the texts (one if free from the library - maybe show them how to access that - on-line via the Monash library). They will most likely ask questions about the assignments. That's changed a lot.

To try to make it more interesting for students - keeping the unit objectives in mind - but allowing for flexibility - there are 5 assignments. Students must do 2 of them. Each will be worth 20%. If they do more than 2 we'll mark them all, but only count their best two.

I'll do a video postcast "episode" talking about that so direct them to that if they want more on that.

As in the past all the assignment descriptions are on-line. All assignments will be submitted on-line.

Nothing much else to add. Maybe double check - if you get a chance that NetBeans is installed in your lab - its is part of the SOE so it should be everywhere.

Enjoy the first week. Any questions? Ask lots, ask often :-)

POD

Lecturer briefing for week 4.

2011-02-24T20:54:00.002+11:00

Lecturer briefing 3

2011-02-24T20:46:00.002+11:00

Lecturer briefing week 2

2011-02-24T20:30:00.002+11:00

Lecturer briefing for week 1.

2011-02-24T18:56:00.002+11:00

Marking guide part II

2010-05-14T16:12:00.002+10:00

For what its worth, here is a link to a "how to" video that accompanies the marking guide we use.

http://screenr.com/crC

POD

Marking guide for assignment 1b

2010-05-14T12:16:00.000+10:00

Hello, FIT2001 markers (what happened to this week - thought I'd be sending this Monday, took till now to get chance to get it out to you. Don't think it would have been that much of a problem for you as I already sent the link to the marking guide and most of you and your tutors know what you are doing, but sorry it took so long.

Again, here is the link to the marking guide.

http://moodle.med.monash.edu.au/file.php/422/Assignment/FIT2001_Marking_Guide_1b.xls

It's the same as the one that we have used for the last few years. It follows the same criteria that the students see on the assignment information page. As usual let your tutors know that is a guide and not a strict prescription, if they find some neat aspect of an assignment that makes up for some other deficiency they are welcome to reward the students, and generally just use their own judgement. The main thing - as always - is to be consistent. I'll worry about cross marker consistency, as long as each marker is consistent within the ones they mark.

As a guide for each of the criteria (to help work out what should be a HD, D, C, P or N) use the following as an aid.

HD - it is hard to find anything the student could do to improve. The few negative things you find are minor and have no real impact on the overall report or model.

D - there are a few areas for improvement, however, it is clear the student understands what they have done. The few problems have effected the overall quality of the report or model but are easily overcome.

C - There are a number of areas that can be better. It will take a reasonable amount of rework to fix these flaws. The overall report or model suffers as a result.

P - There some major issues. It’s not clear that the student understands the purpose of the report/ report section/ model, or some major component has been left out that makes you wonder if the student has an understanding of what’s required in this area. Major rework would be required to correct the problems.

N - This aspect of the report/model is unacceptable. Major rework is required. The student has not demonstrated a basic understanding of what is required. If the project was "real" and moved to the the next stage of the project this part of the report would need to be redone.

One thing to keep in mind is as they have already done an event table and received marks for that - our guide focuses on the consistency of the models so that's taken into account already. If a student has dramatically improved their event table between submissions, please reward that, or if they have not improved then make the focus consistency between the UML models and don't worry so much about the event table (hope that makes sense).

Some students will have included some design details in their class diagram - comment on that but don't mark it down. Lots of class diagrams references and resources mix the analysis usage and the design usage of the models up, so I think its understandable that they aren't super clear on that.

I'll mention it again in the notes to tutors but just remind your tutors that if they can just have an informal chat to the students that turn up to the tutorials during the next weeks to make sure students are clear about the requirements for assignment 2, in particular having a quick look at their class diagrams will help settle nerves about the link between the two assignments.

There are plenty of really good assignments. Here are a couple you can use as a benchmark.

[links removed by POD :-)]

I think these are pretty good - well presented and well modelled. The second one has left attributes off the class diagram, but other than that that they are outstanding examples.

As always don't be scared to poke around the Moodle list in other people's cohorts to get a sense of what everybody is doing. We'll get our Caulfield lot marked pretty early so you can look in that cohort for more examples of what's getting P, C, D and HD (and I guess N too!).

POD

Week 9 - notes for tutors.

2010-04-29T20:13:00.001+10:00

Not much to say this week as its a pretty straight forward week. Encourage them to actually read the article posted, maybe lead a bit of a discussion about the similarity of class diagrams to ER diagrams. The exercises aren't super hard - but make sure they have a go at them and get the basics.

More complex "object" concepts like part-of and generalisation relationships take a bit more work, get them to think about solutions to those kinds of class relationships, but they should "get" the obvious class=entity=table basis of the conversion process pretty easily.

They will also with the 1b submission due soon will probably want to spend some tutorial time on that. That's OK, maybe use looking at their class diagrams as a reason to take them back to thinking about how (in assignment 2) their class diagram would convert to a relational data model.

POD

Notes for tutors - week 8.

2010-04-29T20:12:00.001+10:00

This week some exercises but mainly discussion.

If you feel your group need more hands exercises doing UML, curtail or drop the discussion and give them some more tasks to do on modelling from the text, Check how they are progressing on their assignment. Double check they understand which models have to be in the assignment.

Exercise 1:

Exercise 2:

A good fun way of showing that the way we avoid downtime - in hardware terms anyway - in IT is through redundancy and over-engineering. Simple cheap and effective. Ask them if they know what RAID disk is? Why do computer rooms have two air conditioners? etc to help make the point.

Other exercises:

POD

MARKING GUIDE: ASSIGNMENT 1A

2010-04-19T16:17:00.002+10:00

Hi everybody,

This is for you and your tutors - and anybody else who is marking. Stella already got a preview copy :-), as her students submitted 1a a while ago, I've cc'd Stella just FYI.

This is very similar to last year's guide for those of you that marked 1a last year. Nothing too formal for this submission in the form of a marking guide. The submission is small and I'm hoping that the students will have done it well - the ones I've seen so far have done well. Don't be worried if most of the students get a mark in the D - HD range. I think there will be only a handful of Cs, Ps and hopefully almost no Ns.

The marking guide is simple - and don't apply to rigidly, if there is something unusual or something outside these criteria that you want to reward that's fine, just use your judgement. The main thing is to be consistent. If any marker is - in general too high or too low - I can adjust, as long as you mark consistently for your group. I'll - in the background using Moodle - just double check a few from each marker to make sure we are consistent across the cohort, but I don't expect we will have many problems - esp. with this first submission as its quite simple - and in the past there haven't been any issues.

Basically, there are 5 marks on offer. 4 apply directly to the event table and 1 for the presentation of the submission.

The 4 criteria for the event table - and these interact a little - so if they muck one up they have probably mucked up a couple are: roughly 1 mark for each of these:

Completeness of the events listed - have any major events been left out?
Scope management - evidence that they have thought about what's in and what's out of the system and not simply included everything they thought of.
Level of detail - is the level of detail provided appropriate?
Correctness of representation - is it clear what the events are, have they written the descriptions well, are there spelling mistakes, are the names sensible

The item for presentation (1 mark) is for the overall impression of you conveyed by the report to the client - parts that are draft or left out should be clearly marked. Everything the client reads from you should give them an impression that you are the right person to do the job. Some will submit the event table - those submissions probably miss out on this mark, they should at least have included a memo or paragraph explaining the submission (rather like a letter of transmittal).

From listening to students and looking at their draft work, and now they have submitted there aren't any major problems or issue I think to look out for. Quite a few have too many events - because they have modelled at a low level. Not too much of a problem really, as some of that detail flushes out when they construct the use case descriptions. What I mean is where they have modelled a series of events that really are parts of the same process - rather than just getting the triggering event they have found lots of phases to the process that handles an event and modelled each phase as an event. Comment on that but as long as it makes sense don't make that down too much.

As always quite a few of the events are too physical - login, clicking on screen - similiarly, make a comment but don't mark down too hard - as long as it makes sense. Keep in mind that its their first time using an event table and their knowledge of the system is evolving, and the event table is the first step in understanding the system - so if they overdo a few things don't be too harsh. Do look out for obvious bits of functionality that's missing - esp. the admin events related to creating and maintaining the training material.

I've attached a couple of assignments that I've found that I think are pretty good, not perfect, but good to use as a bench mark.

[LINK REMOVED BY POD]

Here are my thoughts and grades for that one:

Completeness of the events listed: HD - nothing I can see left out.
Scope management: HD - Lots of events but none that are outside what the system should be doing.
Level of detail: D - There are a few events that are really part of a process but not too bad.
Correctness of representation: C - Many names and descriptions (esp. of events and use cases) are too long.
Presentation: HD Really quite good - not sure the "training" pun is a good idea, but at least it showed thought. Like the notes to help explain the table.

[LINK REMOVED BY POD]

Here are my thoughts and grades for that one:

Completeness of the events listed: HD - again, nothing I can see left out.
Scope management: HD - Lots of events but none that are outside what the system should be doing.
Level of detail: C - Quite a few events that are really part of a larger processes that are triggered by a single event.
Correctness of representation: HD, really worked hard to get good meaningful labels. Like the split of the table into lists of events by major involved external agents.
Presentation: HD - Excellent. Godo reuse of the CyberRoo logo. Well formatted, and nice that a paragraph was added explaining the purpose of the table.

Also, just as a matter of style - I prefer to mark out of 10 for each item and then round the mark out of 50 down to 5 - I've set Moodle up so we can report the grade back to the student in N, P, C, D, HD grades with -s and +s. You'll see that when you are in Moodle. The important thing, through is to give as the best feedback you can, comment not only on the event table but anything else in the submission you can - many students (thank goodness) have taken up the offer to use this as a draft for submission 1b - let's try to reward them for doing that by giving them some ideas about what they might do to move those other parts of their 1b submission forward in a good way.

I put together a little Excel spreadsheet to do the maths for me. You are welcome to use that if you want to help you with the numbers:

http://www.box.net/shared/lsln4vxlaz

and a little file showing how to use it:

http://www.box.net/shared/tg81d2i253

Good luck marking!

Let me know if there is anything else you need.

POD

P.S. Just a note about the unit - I think we are really going well at the moment. The feedback on the blogs and on Twitter is generally positive on all campuses - more so than in the past, and we have had some great results in many campuses in the past - so, take a deep breath, we are doing a good job. We should pat ourselves on the back (and our tutors too). Also like to mention the extra work that Cheryl at Berwick is doing, she's rejigged the delivery of the unit at Berwick to suit her cohort - seems to be working really well but it's no small amount of work she's putting in - so well done Cheryl!

Notes for week (5), 6 and 7

2010-03-31T17:52:00.003+11:00

These are a bit late for South Africa (sorry Stella) but in perfect time for the rest of the campuses. Late on Friday I'll add the link too the week 5 solutions on the "tutorial/workshop" page on Moodle. Might be a good idea in week 6 to make sure your class knows its there and maybe to recap any thing (esp. about event tables) that your class struggled with last week. As you get around your class check how they are going with assignment 1a. Most tuts are late in the week - close to the due date so students might be a bit stressed. Note with the solutions to exercises - I'll leave the solutions there for all weeks, so South African students can see them, then take the link off during the week that the tuts are running on other campuses and then replace it again at the end of the week. South Africa is about to be 2 weeks ahead of us so it all should work out OK.

The week 6 and 7 exercise uses VP for UML. Its a good example of a case tool - make sure the students know they can download it and use it at home. They don't have to use it for their assignment work but encourage them to think about using it for that.

Two main aims of these weeks: one is to show the students what a CASE tool is and what is does, the other is to help them do some more UML modelling in a guided and ‘safe’ way. In talking to them emphasize the links between the models. The tutorial does this nicely as they work on a similar cases right through the various types of UML models. If they ﬁnish with time remaining get them to explore the design models that haven't yet been covered in lectures.

As I did for week 5, I'll post solutions at the end of the week. I'll also update the tutorial/workshop page so all the relevant figures from the text are available there as most students don't bring their text to class.

POD

P.S. Don't forget if you need the solutions for any week, that they are in the "Files" section on Moodle.

Notes for tutors - week 5.

2010-03-19T09:43:00.002+11:00

Wow - I know week 5 notes already. Most you you are still doing week 3 and preparing for week 4 but its about to be week 5 in South Africa - so glance over these now and once you are done with your mock interview in week 4 and are preparing for week 5, remember I've got this note here.

I'll post solutions to the week 5 exercises on Moodle at the end of the week (I'll check with Stella at South Africa earlier than everybody else) - but just a reminder if you want them for yourself they are in Moodle in the files section in the tutorial folder. I don't mind if you give them to your students - but I'd prefer if you left it till the end of the tutorial. I think the exercises go better if they don't have the answers but you run your tutorial the way you want (that caveat applies to the following advice too :-) ).

I think its good to direct the class a bit this week, get them all working on the same problem. When you can tell - because they start chatting or facebooking - that most are done with a particular exercise, have a discussion with them about what the answers they have are. Maybe get a student or two to present their solution on the board to the class.

You should get - esp for the lift exercise - a wide variety of solutions. Talk about that - why are they so different. Some will just be wrong - still coming to grips with "events" or how they are represented in a table, others will just have different ideas about the system - what's in what's out, what level of detail is required etc. Get the class to discuss if they find the event table a useful tool for thinking those issues through - remembering its used early in a project to help get an idea of the scope of the system. If during the exercise you see their attention wavering, remind them that event tables are the main thing that has to be done in the first submission!

Do the same thing for the other exercises - add to the discussion on class diagrams a focus on how similar they are (at least during analysis) to E/R diagrams. Both are conceptual data models - just the notation is different (and class diagrams handle generalisation/specialisation better). Have a general chat about OO principles, most should be comfortable with the general concepts of OO design but if you find some that aren't maybe point them at some reading (even the text) that might help fill the gaps for them.

Enjoy, POD

Looking ahead to week 4 and the assignment in general (email sent to campus lecturers).

2010-03-15T10:54:00.002+11:00

Week 4 is a hard week for the tutors (and us) as we need to role play the "client" in the workshops that week (which is this week for Stella). The assignment is based on a memo sent by Bonne Cappell (who I put dowe as head of HR - Cheryl designed the case, hope that was the right position for her - think it works OK.) The memo has been sent to the analysis and design team and contains a really quite well spec'd set of requirements for a system. The students don't really need anymore, but the interview gives them a chance to practice their interviewing skills and to get explanations of whatever they don't understand about the "memo". To start with that could be quite a bit as many will have barely looked at it, and not done much thinking about it. The mock interview has the added benefit of getting them working on the assignment early :-).

The interview can be a lot of fun - but the key to it going well is how well prepared the tutors are to do the role play. They have to use a bit of imagination - but a good place to send them (and yourself too if you need some ideas) is Monash's own web site. Monash - like many organisations - has requirements very like the CyberRoo case study. While the domain is slightly different a good example of the kind of system that CyberRoo are looking for can be found on Monash's web site in the form of the "Equal Opportunity On Line Training". So feel free to have a look at that - or send your tutors there for inspiration: http://www.adm.monash.edu/sss/equity-diversity/equal-opportunity/online-training/quizzes/index.html

Aims and purposes of the Monash On-Line training:

http://www.adm.monash.edu/sss/equity-diversity/equal-opportunity/online-training/about/purpose.html

The assignment page:

http://moodle.monash.edu.au/mod/resource/view.php?id=27886

POD

Notes for tutors - week 3.

2010-03-09T14:56:00.005+11:00

The main exercise in week 3 (I know it's a little while away, but its already week 3 in South Africa!) - watching a video talk by Malcom Gladwell works best if you have a projector in your room. Luckily most rooms have one and a good sound system, if your doesn't maybe approach TSU and get a projector booked

Exercise 1

Just as a general discussion as a quick simple pointer to podcasting as background to listening to Gladwell's talk. This is a good illustration of the intersection of IT and contemporary culture. People often understand little about IT, and the speciality careers available, assume that IT people know about everything IT. A client might judge you on your ability to answer a question about something unrelated to your professional area of specialization but to do with general IT and contemporary culture. Good analysts are aware of this and follow the latest trends. Right now you might need to be up on podcasting, vlogging, blogging and their impact on traditional media, and social networking and the role it can play in the enterprise is another current buzz topic (pardon the pun). The neat thing about podcasts is that many of them are about IT and culture so listening to TWIT, or watching Rocket-boom or commandN is a fun and painless way of staying on-top of the latest IT trends.

Exercise 2
Gladwell's talk should provide a good starting point for a discussion of just how hard it is to gather requirements. IT people are always complain that clients have changed their mind about something, contradicted themselves, contradicted their collegues/boss etc. Gladwell does a great job of explains some of the psychology behind the complexity of talking to people about what they like/want and need. get the class to summarise the main points he made, then discuss them, and finish the discussion of each point by discussing the implications for IT systems. You'll know what systems the students are interested in - for example here at Caulfield we mainly have game developers, so I'll weave games examples into my moderation of the discussion on implications.

Exercise 3
Try to mix the students around so that you have your articulate and good students spread around. There are no marks of offer but its a good chance to practice interviews and will give you an early warning about who is starting on the assignment early.

They aren't really going to get any extra information about the assignment but the interview serves a few purposes.

It gets them to practice and interview - and you can give them feed back about that. Note how "professional" they have been - did they turn up on time, were they polite, did they talk over the top of you, where they prepared - that sort of thing.
It makes them start thinking about the assignment - helps to avoid the last minute rush
Help to calm nerves about the assignment and anything they didn't understand about the case study.

Make sure by the end of the week - they know what group they are in, and what time they have to turn up (they need only come to "their" interview). I let others - who are waiting or just interested - stay in my class room as long as they are quiet. What you do is up to you.

Good luck!

POD

P.S. If you get a chance, can you check for me that VP for UML has been installed in your lab. It is supposed to be installed in every Faculty lab - but each year there are always a few it is missing from. It's pretty easy to get installed if its missing, it can be done overnight in batch, but check it there and we can get it installed if its not. We don't need it till week 6 but better to be sorted out way ahead of time.

Week 1 Tutorial

2010-03-03T10:50:00.002+11:00

Standing right now in the corner of the room while my students are busily working on the first tutorial exercise of the year. Love teaching in the K-Block space, nice spaces are important to teaching. The chairs are comfortable, computers work and have great screens and their is plenty of room. Easy to get everybody to sit around the meeting table and talk.

Right now the task they are working on is to analyze a complex system - this is before they have learned anything about analysis. Later this helps to remind them that they can actually do analysis - after they have become confused by the rules of a formal modelling language (like UML).

They have all chosen the same system - the water system. I guess that's fair as Melbourne has some serious water issues - the result of a 15 year drought. Interestingly, the early discussions they groups have had - of course - have been about defining in exact terms (and terms agreed on by all the members of each team) the scope of the system they are studying. Exactly the task faced early in a project by an analyst. I wonder if they will suffer from scope creep?

Some are already working on PPT slides for a presentation next week. Wonder how they will go? (Good I'm sure.)

POD

First posting to staff for the year (copy)

2010-02-23T13:48:00.001+11:00

Just a very quick hello.

Welcome again to FIT2001! You'll notice a new name on the "to" list - Stella Ouma is joining the team and taking the unit in South Africa. Boon Han is also rejoining us. I'm guessing most of you have your local campus tutors organised (or close to organised) by now. Please when that is finalised let me know, and I'll add their details to the unit web site.

I'm going to use my FIT2001 blog again to distribute notes and comments during the semester - there is a post there now about the week 1 and 2 tutorial. You probably don't need to read it - as the tutorial hasn't changed, but if you want to share that URL with your tutors please do. http://fit2001.blogspot.com/2010/02/notes-for-tutors-weeks-1-and-2.html

No major changes to the running of the unit this year. The assignment has similar structure in the past and is based on an idea developed by Cheryl and Daniel at Berwick. I'm still updating the assignment page on the unit web site, but is located here and will be up to date shortly: http://moodle.monash.edu.au/mod/resource/view.php?id=27886

The unit web site has had a pretty major facelift. No changes to features but changes to the format. Not that there were major problems with the site, but I've changed it - getting feedback from former students - to try to see if we can overcome some of the strange issues we have - with for example, students getting to the end of the semester and not knowing there was a study guide. If you find any broken links, or and weird browser related issues please let me know.

The lecture slides haven't been changed from last year - so if you have local modifications you won't need to worry that the 'central' set has changed in some way you didn't know. the only slide deck that has been updated is the one for week 1. You can get that - and all the slides from: [URL removed]

Two things to note, to avoid confusion:

1) Due to the World Cup, the semester in South Africa has started already. Stella has a very different time table and set of due dates. These are shown on the unit web site. I've created different submission items for the two timetables. Again submissions will be made via Moodle, South African students can only submit using the South African version of the assignment submission page, and the same for non-South African students.

2) At Berwick, Cheryl is using a different but basically equivalent text - she's chosen a text better suited to the needs of her students. That won't effect the rest of us at all. They will still be doing the same assignment, same exam, and be marked to the same standard as the other student groups ... but its useful for you to be aware of that in case your students ask you about it.

That's about all I can think of at the moment. As always feel free to ask me, or the group any questions you have. Let me know of anything I can help with. I'll be recording my lectures, you are welcome to record yours too - let me know if you do. I'll add my lectures to the podcast stream along with some interviews with practitioners. Please, if you'd like to send me a recording you have done to be added to the podcast stream, don't hesitate.

One "fact" that might be nice to let the students know early in the unit. The students who last year keep a reflective blog got a average mark 14% higher than the students who didn't blog. That doesn't count the 3% bonus they got either - so they were on average 17% better off!

Good luck everybody. Have a great semester.

POD

Notes for Tutors - Weeks 1 and 2

2010-02-21T23:21:00.001+11:00

This first exercise is designed to give the students some practice at doing analysis and modelling. It also gives them a chance to practice presentation. You can use that presentation for a quick chat to them about how important being able to present is as analysts and as IT professionals in general (even if they have a technical focus - like networking, or computer science, games development, multimedia etc. - you still need to make good presentations). Give them as much feedback on their presentations as you can.

We have found that most students are naturally good at modelling. Some of the models they have design will be quite innovative and good representations of the systems they are studying. Different groups will approach the modelling if different ways. Some groups will write narrative descriptions, others will do flow chart like representations, others more symbolic models. Keep all the models they create (if possible) and send them to your campus lecturer who will try to use them in the lecture in week 4 when talking about model types.

We have also found when students learn a formal modelling language they get stuck in the syntax and forget that the point is to develop a model. You can remind them of the experience they have in these two exercises later on when they are bogged down in the technical aspects of the creation of formal UML diagrams. Our aim to to get them to see UML as a modelling formalism rather than just a way of drawing diagrams. Having this non-UML experience helps remind them of the nature of modelling.

It is tempting to talk about UML, DFD, flowcharts etc, but other then helping them understand the two systems they are investigating don’t direct their modelling activity. Let them experience for themselves the key decisions - what to represent (where the boundaries are), what level of detail to go to, how to represent the model, how to explain it, and what is the purpose of the model. Help them to surface these issues but try not to resolve them for them.

Some students will find that lack of structure uncomfortable, so try hard to keep them engaged and "into" the exercise.

Also, do your best to encourage the students to at least try blogging. It really does help them and isn't too hard. Please collect the URLs of the blogs of your students and send them on to me, then I can create a aggregate page to try to encourage sharing (and of course it helps me work out who gets the bonus marks!) If you keep a blog - why not :-) -let me know and I'll add your to the list.

Don't be scared to spend some class time, just chatting, introduce yourself, get to know your students. Hope your semester starts well. Have fun!

POD

Marking guide for assignment 2

2009-06-03T14:18:00.004+10:00

The marking guide - which is the same one we have used in past years (and of course, reflects the criteria given to the students) - is loaded on Moodle at:

FIT2001_Marking_Guide_2.xls

Just a few things to keep in mind when marking this one. The key link between this and assignment 1 is the class diagram and a use case. The class diagram is used to create a design class diagram and a relational data model. If their assignment 1 class diagram had some problems, don't re-penalise them for that - only look at how they have taken what they had and converted it.

If they have - as a result of feedback from you, or just because they worked it out themselves - improved their class diagram, then find a way to reward them for that but don't take marks off for the same mistake twice (hope that makes sense).

Other than that comment, not much for me to say, again be consistent within your cohort, hopefully we won't differ too much from marker to marker, but I can sort out those marking wobbles as long as you mark consistently within your groups. (Of course I'm happy to look at anything you want a second opinion on!)

As always, try hard to give good feedback, and to get them back as quickly as we can. We should have everything marked well before the exam, that will help calm nerves for the students, and make the paperwork easier for us all!

Rather than e-mailing exemplars as I did for 1a and 1b, this time just check the cohort's I'm marking (Gippsland and Caulfield) for examples of the various grades.

Good luck marking everybody.

POD

Notes for tutors - week 11.

2009-05-17T18:57:00.002+10:00

Interface design this week.

Exercise (1): Many of the differences are obvious - a nice search box, better style, less graphics, alt text, meta tags etc. and most importantly consistency.

Archive.org preserves old links, see how the style (of any web site) has changed in the past - now its much more consistent. Discuss how the y use the Monash site - do they ﬁnd it useful? Who are the users and how does having such a broad range of users make design difﬁcult.

Let them explore archive.org a little - it's a lot of fun!

Exercise (2): As always Nielsen has an interesting article on his site: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/ia-mistakes.html. After letting the students explore his site for a while why not use that article for a discussion.

Exercise (3): and Exercise (4): are basic exercises and fairly straight forward. Main thing is to make sure they understand how to sketch screens and also map the interaction from one screen to another. Some tools that they might like to explore:

http://www.mockupscreens.com/

http://www.balsamiq.com/

Hang in there - heaps of marking making our lives stressful. Try to get around to everybody in your tutorial and at least give them some feedback on their class diagram. That's the main thing they need to be confident about as they work on assignment 2.

POD

Circus season (when everybody is a bit silly)

2009-05-12T11:23:00.003+10:00

Seems like everybody is stressed out at this time of the semester, and it doesn't end for a month or so - till exams are done. Students are stressed, which means we get stressed, it's contagious!

It's interesting reading blogs, tweets, emails and just talking to students at this time of year - the pointy end of semester when assignments are due and with exams looming. Students tend to coast a bit early and then hit this time of year and get so overwhelmed by their work load that they can't find the time to attend lectures and tutorials. Not all of course, but many. I try to take that into account when I design the schedule. The "hard" or important tutorials and lectures are in weeks when I hope students will be able to pay attention. So last week - week 9 - an easy week and stuff that wasn't so important in the run up to a major submission, but this week, week 10 an important lecture and workshop.

But its not perfect, we only get 13 weeks ad we have to get lots of stuff across, but nobody learns anything when stressed. Well OK, you do need a bit of stress - that's the main reason we set assignments and add marks to them as then we know you will actually do something and what you do will "stick" but not all of it, in fact probably not much of it at all. Learning's best when its fun - I wonder if there aren't ways we can design our semesters and our teaching that can take the high stress out.

In one unit I teach I think I've come close, students work on a portfolio, they pick and choose what they do and when they do. All the tutorial exercises have components that can be submitted. There are some minimums (like the amount of group and individual work that have to be met) but its up to the students to decide what they do and when they do it. Takes the stress out of it, makes it more fun and relevant to each individual but I still have to "ride" them hard to make sure they don't leave things to the last minute - not necessarily as a result of what's happening in my class, but the deadlines of other classes take over priorities.

Maybe a portfolio approach can be applied to FIT2001. Not sure how we'd manage marking and standards across campuses which is hard enough with a traditional assignment but it might be worth a try.

Another thing that bugs me is the way we have a lecture and tutorial each week. I'd love it if we could have - instead of 13 lectures, two full days of seminar - one at the start, and then one in the middle (or similiar). Cover all the material in those intense sessions and then leave the rest for the time for labs, assignments and structured discussion and reading about the content covered in the "intense" sessions. Think that would be great, but not sure how well it would scale - 20 people in a workshop for a day is fun, but 100/200 in a lecture room all day, not so fun.

Anyway, maybe, if you aren't too stressed and have a moment you could let me know if you have any ideas?

POD

Marking guide for assignment 1b

2009-05-05T13:01:00.002+10:00

Here is the URL for the marking guide for submission 1b.

http://moodle.med.monash.edu.au/file.php/76/Assignment/FIT2001_Marking_Guide_1b.xls

It's the same as the one that we used last year. It follows the same criteria that the students see on the assignment information page. As usual let your tutors know that is a guide and not a strict prescription, if they find some neat aspect of an assignment that makes up for some other deficiency they are welcome to reward the students, and generally just use their own judgement. The main thing - as always - is to be consistent. I'll worry about cross marker consistency, as long as each marker is consistent within the ones they mark.

The only thing to keep in mind is as they have already done an event table and received marks for that - our guide focuses on the consistency of the models so that's taken into account already. If a student has dramatically improved their event table between submissions, please reward that, or if they have not improved then make the focus consistency between the UML models and don't worry so much about the event table (hope that makes sense).

POD

Notes for tutors - week 9.

2009-05-03T21:30:00.002+10:00

POD

Notes for tutors - week 8.

2009-04-21T17:02:00.003+10:00

This week some exercises but mainly discussion.

Exercise 1:

Exercise 2:

Other exercises:

POD

Assignment 1a marking guide

2009-04-15T13:03:00.002+10:00

Marking has begun for assignment 1a. We will all be doing our best to get them back to you as quickly as we can. I thought I'd share with you (an edited) the advice I sent out to the markers:

"Hello, FIT2001/FIT9030 markers;

(This is very similar to last years guide for those of you that marked 1a last year). Nothing to formal for this submission, its small and I'm hoping that the students will have done it well - the ones I've looked at so far have. So don't be worried if most of the students get a mark in the D - HD range. I think there will be only a handful of Cs, Ps and hopefully almost no Ns.

The marking guide is simple - and don't apply to rigidly, if there is something unusual or something outside these criteria that you want to reward that's fine, just use your judgement. The main thing is to be consistent. If any marker is - in general too high or too low - I can adjust, as long as you mark consistently for your group. I'll - in the background - just double check a few from each marker to make sure we are consistent across the cohort, but i don't expect we will have many problems - esp. with this first submission as its quite simple - and in the past there haven't been any issues.

Basically, there are 5 marks on offer. 4 apply directly to the event table and 1 for the presentation of the submission.

The 4 criteria for the event table - and these interact a little - so if they muck one up they have probably mucked up a couple are: roughly 1 mark for each of these:

Completeness of the events listed - have any major events been left out?
Scope management - evidence that they have thought about what's in and what's out of the system and not simply included everything they thought of
Level of detail - is the level of detail provided appropriate?
Correctness of representation - is it clear what the events are, have they written the descriptions well, are there spelling mistakes, are the names sensible?

The item for presentation (1 mark) is for the overall impression of you conveyed by the report to the client - parts that are draft or left out should be clearly marked. Everything the client reads from you should give them an impression that you are the right person to do the job. Some have just submitted the event table - those submissions probably miss out on this mark, they should at least have included a memo or paragraph explaining the submission (rather like a letter of transmittal).

I've looked at around 40 assignments now - mainly the early submissions. The ones I looked at are pretty good. A couple of things to keep in mind. This system involves a lot of interaction with another system/s. They are a little unsure about how to model this with an event table and as a result have captured events that really are precedent events and have, for example, the customer as source for a lot of events. For most of these, the real source should be the other system. Comment on that, but don't mark down for it - the interaction of the other systems will become clearer as they develop their use case models and start the think about the detail of the processes, so we can forgive it in their first go at an event table. We might have to keep an eye on that in tutorials when you get to look at drafts of their work to make sure they are starting to model it better as they go.

Another thing to comment on but not take marks off for, is that lots of them are modelling the "iPhone" explicitly - as a physical item. Better to model logically, probably will be an iPhone, but thinking too early about how the system will be implemented what it is might rule out other options that haven't yet been thought about. The thing to concentrate on is the information that moves around and is processed rather than the actual devices doing it.

Here are a couple of assignments that I've spotted that I think are pretty good, you might like to use these as benchmarks. They aren't perfect, but will give you a bit of an idea of what I think is HD standard.

[file links removed by POD]

If you want more examples, I'm going to try to mark my lot by the end of tomorrow, feel free to click around the Caulfield cohort to see how I've marked - and read my comments. After a few the comments are quite similar as i am able to do a lot of copying and pasting..

I put together a little Excel spreadsheet to do the maths for me. You are welcome to use that if you want to help you with the numbers:

[file link removed by POD]

and a little file showing how to use it:

[file link removed by POD]

Good luck marking!"

POD

Notes for tutors - week (5) 6 and 7.

2009-04-03T15:55:00.002+11:00

I've added the link to the week 5 solutions on the "tutorial/workshop" page on Moodle. Might be a good idea in week 6 to make sure your class knows its there and maybe to recap any thing (esp. about event tables) that your class struggled with last week. As you get around your class check how they are going with assignment 1a. Most tuts are late in the week - close to the due date so students might be a bit stressed.

POD

Notes for tutors - week 5.

2009-03-30T11:09:00.002+11:00

I'll have to do this in two parts - as mainly what I have for you this week is the "answers". I'll post solutions on Moodle at the end of the week - just a reminder if you want them for yourself they are in Moodle in the files section in the tutorial folder. I don't mind if you give them to your students - but I'd prefer if you left it till the end of the tutorial. I think the exercises go better if they don't have the answers but you run your tutorial the way you want (that caveat applies to the following advice too :-) ).

I think its good to direct the class a bit this week, get them all working on the same problem. When you can tell - because they start chatting or facebooking - that most are done, have a discussion with them about what the answers they have are. Maybe get a student or two to present their solution on the board to the class.

Enjoy, POD

Systems analysis and design in multimedia IT courses

2009-03-17T20:46:00.002+11:00

Did a similar "survey" a few years ago for computer science students at Clayton - where I looked at course structures other than Monash to see where analysis and design fitted in other quality Universities. The answer to that was in the core - just like at Monash.

I've been sensing - I'm being polite - a little resistance to the unit from some students at Berwick this year in their blogs. They aren't sure its relevant to their career aim. Of course it is - and I'll have to do my best to convince them. However, some objective data is always a good thing so I thought is would be worth doing a similar survey of multimedia courses at the good Universities in Australia. Sadly, very few of the G08 consider multimedia to be an academic discipline, so courses are only offered at 3 of the Universities - including Monash. Analysis and design is - in the other two courses - in the core of the degrees. I've uploaded my little report if you are interested (its small!).

POD

Notes for tutors - week 3.

2009-03-12T23:19:00.007+11:00

The main exercise this week - watching a video talk by Malcom Gladwell works best if you have a projector in your room. Luckily most rooms have one and a good sound system, if your doesn't maybe approach TSU and get a projector booked.

Exercise 1
Just as a general discussion as a quick simple pointer to podcasting as background to listening to Gladwell's talk. This is a good illustration of the intersection of IT and contemporary culture. People often understand little about IT, and the speciality careers available, assume that IT people know about everything IT. A client might judge you on your ability to answer a question about something unrelated to your professional area of specialization but to do with general IT and contemporary culture. Good analysts are aware of this and follow the latest trends. Right now you might need to be up on podcasting, vlogging, blogging and copyright laws. The neat thing about podcasts is that many of them are about IT and culture so listening to TWIT, or watching Rocket-boom or commandN is a fun and painless way of staying on-top of the latest IT trends.

Exercise 2
Gladwell's talk should provide a good starting point for a discussion of just how hard it is to gather requirements. IT people are always complain that clients have changed their mind about something, contradicted themselves, contradicted their collegues/boss etc. Gladwell does a great job of explains some of the psychology behind the complexity of talking to people about what they like/want and need. get the class to summarise the main points he made, then discuss them, and finish the discussion of each point by discussing the implications for IT systems. You'll know what systems the students are interested in - for example here at Caulfield we mainly have game developers, so I'll weave games examples into my moderation of the discussion on implications.

Exercise 3
Try to mix the students around so that you have your articulate and good students spread around. There are no marks of offer but its a good chance to practice interviews and will give you and early warning about who is starting on the assignment early.
They aren't really going to get any extra information about the assignment but the interview serves a few purposes.

It gets them to practice and interview - and you can give them feed back about that. Note how "professional" they have been - did they turn up on time, were they polite, did they talk over the top of you, where they prepared - that sort of thing.
It makes them start thinking about the assignment - helps to avoid the last minute rush
Help to calm nerves about the assignment and anything they didn't understand about the case study.

Good luck!

POD

Lecture streaming

2009-03-03T10:23:00.002+11:00

In the please don't expect to much, why am i doing this, oh my God it will all go wrong, hey it might work, it could be fun, oh what they heck lets give it a try category ... I'm going to stream my lectures from Caulfield live - on both UStream and Userplane.

Why: Well I thought it might help any off-campus students to at least feel connected to the the on-campus activities. Even if it helps just one person, I think it will be easy to do, so I thought I'd have a go and see.

Why on both UStream and Userplane: Becuase I can! I'm not sure which will be best. I think I can do both at once, so I will and we can work out which is best based on our experiences.

How: Well, I'm just going to log in to both services on my laptop, point by built in camera roughly at the projection of my slides and hit "go". I'll pick audio up from a bluetooth lapel Mic. With Userplane I'll have another USB camera plugged into the lecture room PC and have that pointed to the "audience" - to help get more of a feel what's happening in the room.

What are the URLS: I'll post these again in the twitter stream. For UserPlane its the same as the Video chat room link on the front page of the Moodle web site:

http://moodle.med.monash.edu.au/mod/resource/view.php?id=4797

For UStream its the "FIT2001" channel: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/fit2001

Love to know how it goes if you are on the web end of either of these streams. Might be completely useless, but even that would be good to know.

POD

Notes for tutors - week 1 and 2.

2009-02-27T17:31:00.003+11:00

Just some quick exam facts

2008-06-27T22:40:00.002+10:00

Lots more to come soon:

Hardest question - average 51% - Question 3.4 - the sequence diagram, but that is much improved on last year!

Easiest question (hmm not easiest, but best answered - not including part A) - average 81% - Question 2.5 - What are the parts of a use case model.

Lots of good results in Part A - 8.5% of students got 40/40 for that section, that's pretty damn good.

POD

No stats yet - but an update.

2008-06-17T11:58:00.002+10:00

Lots done, only 40 part A to be marked, no part B marked yet, and 280 part C to go.

Seems like part A has gone well.

In part C - which I'm doing, I'm pretty happy - though the last few I did weren't so good :-(, generally Q1 is very good, Q2 is very good, question 3 is OK, and question 4 is much improved on last year (which is the reason why we added the sequence diagram into the assignment - last year there were lots of zeros for this question, this year there still is too many but they are rare.

POD

Stunning interview with Peter Keen

2008-05-30T11:35:00.002+10:00

Love Peter Keen's work - always with reading and listening to. In this interview he says a lot that I thought - and even put into the unit. Have a listen.

http://www.gartner.com/it/products/podcasting/asset_199209_2575.jsp

POD

1b Marking guide.

2008-05-08T10:21:00.002+10:00

Here is a copy of the memo I sent to the teaching staff with the marking guide used for assignment 1b.

Hi, been busy telling everybody the 1b marking guide was on Moodle, and it was - but now it isn't! Must have been accidently deleted - so sorry about that. Anyway, I'll re-upload it and attach it to this e-mail as well.

Anyway, the guide - in the form of an Excel sheet is the same as it was for last year. It follows the same criteria that the students see on the assignment information page. As usual let your tutors know that is is a guide and not a strict prescription, if they find some neat aspect of an assignment that makes up for some other deficiency they are welcome to reward the students, and generally just use their own judgement. The main thing - as always - is to be consistent. I'll worry about cross marker consistency, as long as each marker is consistent within the ones they mark.

The only thing that is a bit different this year is that they have already done an event table and received marks for that - our guide focuses on the consistency of the models so that's taken into account already. If a student has dramatically improved their event table between submissions, please reward that, but if they have used one of the exemplar's available instead of their own, or got feedback late and not improved as a result then make the focus consistency between the UML models and don't worry so much about the event table (hope that makes sense).

I know its mentioned in the week-by-week guide but just remind your tutors that if they can just have an informal chat to the students that turn up to their tutorial during the next week, having a quick look at their class diagrams will help settle nerves about the link between the two assignments.

The world is changing (again).

2008-05-06T17:21:00.003+10:00

Neat article about a memo written by Ray Ozzie for internal consumption at Microsoft.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/22/the-ozzie-memo—software-is-dead-long-live-the-web/

POD

IBM Flowchart template

2008-05-01T14:11:00.002+10:00

Found a pic on the web of an old IBM flowchart template. The good old days!

http://IBMcollectables.com/gallery/view_photo.php?set_albumName=album121&id=Flowchart_template_X20_8020_clear

POD

Great timing.

2008-04-22T13:33:00.005+10:00

In my tut today, we discussed how to make systems reliable - and the standard way of introducing redundancy rather than better engineering, to ensure availability. I jokingly said that sure enough, we will notice some web site somewhere - that despite this engineering will still go down. Well, just went to www.dse.com.au (Dick Smith's web site), and got this message:

Perfect!

POD
P.S. For sticky beaks like me, Netcraft reports the site is hosted by Telecom New Zealand and is based in Windows 2000 and IIS 5.0. No uptime is reported, but it looks like a single machine ... are they applying a patch or service pack? What do you think? What is the business cost of the site being down - should they have more redundancy to avoid this?

Marking guide

2008-04-16T13:29:00.002+10:00

Just wrote a message with a short informal guide for marking for all the lecturers and tutors marking assignment 1a in FIT2001 - not that they need much of a guide - they are all good and can do just fine without my advice! But anyway ... was thinking, that there was no reason why I shouldn't share with the students the information I send on the the staff (with some edit's of course) so here is the message I sent:

"Hello, FIT2001 markers;

Nothing to formal for this submission, its small and I'm hoping that the students will have done it well - the ones I've looked at so have have. So don't be worried if most of the students get a mark in the D - HD range. I think there will be only a handful of Cs. Ps and hopefully almost no Ns.

The marking guide is simple - and don't apply to rigidly, if there is something unusual or something outside these criteria that you want to reward that's fine, just use your judgement. The main thing is to be consistent. If any marker is - in general too high or too low - I can adjust, as long as you mark consistently for your group. I'll - in the background - just double check a few from each marker to make sure we are consistent across the cohort, but i don't expect we'll have many problems - esp. with this first submission as its quite simple.

Basically, there are 5 marks on offer. 4 apply directly to the event table and 1 for the presentation of the submission.

The 4 criteria for the event table - and these interact a little - so if they much one up they have probably mucked up a couple are: roughly 1 mark for each of these:
Completeness of the events listed - have any major events been left out?
Scope management - evidence that they have thought about what's in and what's out of the system and not simply included everything they thought of
Level of detail - is the level of detail provided appropriate?
Correctness of representation - is it clear what the events are, have they written the descriptions well, are there spelling mistakes, are the names sensible?
The item for presentation (1 mark) is for the overall impression of you conveyed by the report to the client - parts that are draft or left out should be clearly marked. Everything the client reads from you should give them an impression that you are the right person to do the job. Some have just submitted the event table - those submission probably miss out on this mark, they should at least have included a memo or paragraph explaining the submission (rather like the letter of transmittal).

Here are a couple of assignments that I've spotted that I think are pretty good, you might like to use these as benchmarks:
[REMOVED FROM BLOG POST]

If you want more examples, I'm going to try to mark my lot today and tomorrow, feel free to click around the Caulfield cohort to see how I've marked.

Also, just as a matter of style - I prefer to mark out of 10 for each item and then round the mark out of 50 down to 5 - I've set Moodle up so we can report the grade back to the student in N, P, C, D, HD grades with -s and +s. You'll see that when you are in Moodle. The important thing, through is to give as the best feedback you can, comment not only on the event table but anything else in the submission you can - many students (thank goodness) have taken up the offer to use this as a draft for submission 1b - let's try to reward them for doing that by giving them some ideas about what they might do to move those other parts of their 1b submission forward in a good way.

Good luck marking!"

Nice overview of UML (repost)

2008-04-08T16:00:00.002+10:00

Just another link I posted here last year, that's worth posting again:

The first in a good a series of articles on the developer.com on UML. For more, just search on the authors (or use UML as a search term).

http://www.developer.com/design/article.php/1553851

POD

Nearly done with feeling sick.

2008-04-08T15:42:00.003+10:00

Feeling like I've beaten whatever virus/cold/bug I've had. Got through the lecture Ok today, wasn't as exciting as I'd like and didn't give enough examples but it was OK. Tuts are going fine (for me at least), but I think that's because I have a super group of students - who are all still turning up (which is pretty amazing, its soooo easy esp. now there are all sorts of assignments due, to skip a few tutorials and even lectures here and there - but it really does make the whole semester easier if you do keep coming).

Found a couple of neat links - not sure where to post them. Maybe here is the place.

First is one I posted last year "... Ed Yourdon was one of the early proponents and popularisers of the structured approaches. He has put his 1989 book "Structured Analysis" up on the web in wiki format - so anybody can help update it. It's an astonishing resource. Check it out. While we aren't concentrating on structure analysis the stuff in the introduction is perfect for the first part of the course and some of the stuff in the appendices is useful as well (not just for the unit, but later for your professional careers!)"

Might experiment a little soon with a Wiki for this unit. I've used them before to write papers with a small number of people - and to be honest it didn't work very well, but with a larger number maybe it will go OK (thinking of a wiki page to write a reflection on how Moodle went - that way everybody could contribute if they wanted too.)

That's enough blogging for now, got to rest to beat this thing totally (and edit the lecture audio for the podcast stream).
POD

Marks distribution

2007-07-05T12:16:00.000+10:00

The examiner's report is coming - and I'll post it here - which provides the chance for anybody to post comments so please come back, visit and comment.

POD

This is pretty cool.

2007-06-22T17:14:00.000+10:00

http://www.macorpc.org/

Enjoy.

POD

Library fairies

2007-06-22T15:46:00.000+10:00

Not funny but nice try - you know who you are!

Also just marked a paper with a perfect section A and perfect section B and near perfect section C - raw score of 96.5, that's the best so far.

POD

Systems Analysis and Design and Computer Science

2007-06-21T10:26:00.000+10:00

In among the discussion that erupted on the MUSO forum on marking (and you only get to see the public side of that debate, I have many, many e-mails on the topic, most of them hilarious, but as they were private e-mails its not right for me to publish them) there were some comments along the lines of what has "analysis and design got to do with computer science anyway?" While I think the answer to the question - a lot - is obvious, the people who were asking think the answer is also obvious - nothing.

Rather than just shouting opinions at one another I thought I gather some more objective evidence (if it existed) to support my arguments, o I did a quick survey of the other Group of 8 (research intensive) Universities in Australia. I thought I'd share the results with you here. 7 of the 8 offer a computer science degree in some form - though not all are "pure" traditional BCompSci degrees and most of those have a unit on analysis and design in the core. Sydney Uni's degree (Computer Science and Information Technology) is closest to what we offer as Computer Science - with a unit in the second year core (looking at the past and sample exam papers for that unit, I'm pretty sure their students could sit our exam, and ours could sit theirs). It is interesting to note that Sydney also recently did a major review of IT courses, just like we did, gathering opinions from academics around the world and from industry to reshape their courses and School structures. Some of the others mix Analysis and Design with database (which is also quite common in more business related courses) and with software engineering. If you'd like more detail here is the file I put together.

POD

Exam marking and calculus

2007-06-19T20:56:00.000+10:00

I'm always reminded of calculus (and my now ancient background in maths and physics) when I mark exam papers - remember calculus - looking at the rate of changes of curves dy/dx - always with an assumption of diminishing dx. That's how it feels, you take one off the pile and it doesn't make much difference, and then another and another and it still doesn't make a difference.

Well I'm 4 bags into 20 and the results are looking OK - average raw mark is in the mid 60s and hardly any fails and most not so bad that the assignment marks can't save them. People have gone wonderfully well on part A, even a handful of 40/40's there (the easiest question looks like question 1, and the hardest question 20). Part B is pretty awful, the best answered questions look like 2.1 (SDLC) and 2.8 (input validation controls), the worst 2.4 (on structured design, which surprises me, I thought that wasn't so hard). Part C has been done pretty well, some stuff is being left of the class diagram and sometimes the sequence diagram is a mess but the use case questions look like they have been done wonderfully well.

Anyway, I'd better get back to it.

POD

Thank goodness that one is done.

2007-05-22T16:24:00.000+10:00

Golly that was hard. I was barely coherent at the start. Lecturing is hard at the best of times, my approach involves me mentally rehearsing in the days before - I never remember all the things I mean to say but it usually puts me in a good situation to adapt to the way the "audience" is or isn't reacting - but today, well I'm glad I survived. I've barely had a coherent thought for the last week and that included the first hour of the lecture. Anyway, sometimes the bad lectures are the best. I've given some lectures where I thought I nailed the material and explained it best I can and then got the exams and realise nobody understood anything and then also had days like today which don't go well and the students "get" it. My little theory on this is the better the lecture, the more comfortable the students are, the less motivation they have to do more reading and make the material really sink in. When they get a stinker - they panic a bit and go an read and revise. Anyway, its a good theory so hopefully everybody will go away and read the text and learn that way :-).

Anyway, despite all that and I'm not sure how - I pulled my self together and actually delivered he second hour quite well. I only hope somebody was awake by then to hear it.

One week to go. Hope everybody is hanging in there and getting all those assignments done - and please don't get sick (like me). Keep eating well and try hard to get good sleep.

POD

Jacob Nielsen on Usability

2007-05-15T22:03:00.000+10:00

Nice little interview with usability evangalist Jacob Nielsen. Enjoy.

POD

Code Monkey

2007-05-04T17:46:00.000+10:00

Just reading a neat blog entry from K-Sheep and it reminded me of a song from Johnathan Coulton (who I have mentioned before) and I thought it was worth sharing here. Esp. CS and SE folks will enjoy it. It's become a bit of an anthem for coders on the web.

National do not call register

2007-05-03T18:39:00.000+10:00

This system was supposed to handle 700,000 hits per hour. Somebody, somewhere got the maths wrong - try https://www.donotcall.gov.au/ and see if you get "The Do Not Call Register is currently experiencing very high demand, thank you for your patience." at the top of the page.

Latest podcast interview

2007-05-03T18:03:00.000+10:00

Sorry the audio quality isn't great - trying hard to keep the file sizes down. Do listen to the latest interview when you get a spare moment. It's with a former student - finished last year - who is working on a project that has 1000 people on it - and that's just the analysis and design people (all the code is being done off-shore).

POD

Dilbert on Analysis and Design

2007-05-02T22:27:00.000+10:00

Image hosted by Archive.org

POD

Death by UML Fever

2007-05-02T22:26:00.000+10:00

Enjoy!

http://www.acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=printer_friendly&pid=130&page=1

BB web site in the news

2007-04-23T16:40:00.000+10:00

I'm not a fan of Big Brother, maybe you are, but either way read this article from today's Age. What a mess. Good example of a system where the non-functional requirements have been messed up.

http://www.theage.com.au/news/tv--radio/porn-privacy-glitches-hit-big-bro/2007/04/23/1177180548617.html

POD

GTD and life hacks.

2007-04-19T10:55:00.000+10:00

They are the terms being used by the Web 2.0 folks to describe techniques for personal productivity. (GTD = getting things done). I'm guessing that everybody is starting to feel a little overwhelmed by the passing of time and the number of assignments due soon so take some time out and read and listen to this little collection provided by Merlin Mann and Leo Laporte on Merlin's 43 folders site. The main thing is the audio recording on an interview with a guy named David Allen who has written a good book on GTD. Hope this helps (somebody).

http://www.43folders.com/2007/04/09/merlin-gtd-tech-guy/

POD

Joost

2007-04-12T09:55:00.000+10:00

Totally unrelated to 2001 but today I got my download link to try out the Beta of Joost. These are hard to get (though maybe they are getting easier now) and I've been on the waiting list for ages. So what's Joost you ask - its a new Internet thingy that's been getting lots and lots of press - basically its a kind of web TV. The people that have started Joost also started Kazaa and Skype so they have a good track record. Anyway, my choices right now are (1) finish writing the first draft of the FIT2001 exam, or (2) install and trial Joost. What do you think I'll choose?

POD

Nice overview of UML

2007-04-04T11:25:00.000+10:00

The first in a good a series of articles on the developer.com on UML. For more, just search on the authors (or use UML as a search term).

http://www.developer.com/design/article.php/1553851

POD

New product for 37 signals

2007-04-04T11:16:00.000+10:00

Just for interest - if you liked what Jason Fried had to say - his company has just launched a new product - a contact and CRM system - http://www.highrisehq.com/. I nearly used a CRM case study for 2001 this semester - lucky I didn't (this is exactly what I would have hope you would have designed!).

POD

Events and things in the workshop!

2007-03-29T00:17:00.000+10:00

Just while its fresh in my mind - and I'm still up - some feedback I gave to my studio/workshop class today about the event and class diagram exercises.

First, and this would have been mentioned in the lectures, don't expect to get your event table perfect first time. You will take a while to get the level of detail right and the right kind of events, so if you get a few wrong to start with don't worry. The purpose of the event table is to provide a basis for beginning the development of use case descriptions. We'll cover those next week but they document the responses that the system makes to the events. In making those descriptions it will become clear to you that some of the lower level events are just part of a system process and not usefully described in the event table, the same might be true of some error processing. On the other hand as you do the use case descriptions you'll discover some events that are missing - so like everything in modelling it iterative. You refine it as you go - but do recognise that think about events is a great starting point for analysis of a system, that's the main thing to "get".

Now class diagrams, everybody is find them quite easy, as they are a little familiar with them from programming and also they are similar to ER models from database, but it is amazing for even simple problems how different peoples "objects" can be. That can be OK - it might not be - but it can be that there are several valid representations of the same domain. Another important lesson - perhaps the most important one - is that objects (classes, entities, events use cases, whatever) aren't just lying around waiting to be identified. Some are more obvious than others, the trick is to recognise that you are making design decisions all the time about what;s a class and what's not. That realisation will lead to you think more about the alternative you have when you "write them down" and as a result make you a better analyst/desiger.

POD

Another free book on systems analysis

2007-03-25T11:21:00.000+10:00

Looks like the author of this one has put the full text on the web as the book is out of print - good on 'em. Its a traditional book covering structured analysis and information engineering but lots of good information in there for 2001. Enjoy.
POD

Jeff Veen Interview on the Merlin Show

2007-03-22T23:01:00.000+11:00

Some background. Merlin Mann is a guru in GTD (getting things done - productivity). He has recently launched a video blog which features interviews with interesting people - its called the Merlin Show. have a look at the interviews with Jeff Veen, a systems analyst working for Google. Check it out at http://www.43folders.com/.

POD

Events thing and interviews

2007-03-21T22:40:00.000+11:00

Interesting week getting stuck into the meat of the unit now, the context is set.

Lecture went fine, but how ironic that just as I was about to talk about events that arise due to some condition being met within a system that the fire alarm - in test mode at least - went off. Perfect example of that kind of event.

I'm sure my tutorial was like others - most of the interviews went very well with good questions being asked, but interesting how much last minute listening to the recording was going on. One of the reasons for putting that tutorial in the schedule is to force people to start thinking about the assignment early. I'd say that it had the desired effect!

Anyway the interviews, just some feedback I gave my group which probably was true for lots of groups. Often they didn't begin the interview well - little things like a firm shake of the hand and looking me in the eye - I got one or the other but rarely both. Most groups introduced themselves but didn't explain their role, just gave me a name and sat down. Nice to know something about the team structure - which leads to the next thing. Often groups had a list of questions - good - but asked them in random order and with random people asking. When I gave a response everybody would start writing rather than listening to my answer. Better to have had a person act as scribe, maybe they could ask follow-up questions but get the others there to ask questions and listen to the answers but not have to worry about writing anything down. Hard to write and listen at the same time.

Nobody recorded the interview, maybe that's OK, as people act differently if you record them, but maybe after they got to know them better in later interviews you could ask their permission to record.

Some groups explained they wanted to ask me a few questions, but none really explained the purpose of the interview and where it fitted within overall project - essential to do that. Also a good idea to give the interviewee a time estimate, "thanks for meeting with us, this should take X minutes, hope that's Ok", puts them at ease and gives them confidence that you are capable.

At vital at the end of the interview to thank the person for their time, most did that very nicely, but tell them what's happening next. When will the next hear from you. You should send them a summary of the interview for verification, hell them that and tell them when they can expect it - help them know what to expect and resolves any uncertainty they have about you or the project.

Interviewing is a vital skill for analysts, but hopefully you will recognise, it takes more than great questions to make a good interview. The interview doesn't just get information for you, it helps to develop the relationship you have with the client and their opinions of you and the system/project - in short its a partial PR exercise. Hope the "mock" interview helped reinforce some of those points for you.

POD

300 odd e-mails

2007-03-18T12:48:00.000+11:00

Miss a few days and my in-tray takes on a life of its own. Not sure when I'll emerge from the other side but time to roll up my selves and get into it. I was at a conference last week - in my research domain (data warehousing and business intelligence) - in Sydney. Saw a good selection of presentations, some plain awful and some fantastic. The conference was organised by a vendor - Teradata and mainly featured presentations by them and their customers. One thing that struck me - data warehousing can be very, very technical with masses of data to manage ina volatile query environment - was that the skills we are talking about in 2001 - the mix of business and technical skills required of an analyst, well that mix is also required of the technical people too. One of the best presentations was given by an operations manager - his job is to keep 3.5 terrabytes of data going, with 99% or so of all queries hitting the database coming back in less than 2 seconds. His main problem is demonstrating the ROI of the choosen architcture to the business people. Not only does have to worry about the engineering, but how to "sell" and account for the solution he has choosen. Nothing revolutionary in the accounting methods he used, just like the material in Satzinger et al, but the point was that was his main task - as a techo. So there is no escape from the business side to of things!

Nice to go to a conference where I wasn't speaking for a change - no nerves, but that changes this week. On Thursday I give a webinar, gooly that's hard, talking to some slides and not being able to see the audience, not getting and feedback. Wish me luck! (At least it will keep me on edge for my lecture on Tuesday and my tut on Wednesday!

Good luck preparing for your interviews this week, most of you will of course leave to the last minute and make it up on the fly, but hopefully not all witll be like that and will make good use of the chance to practice a "real" interview :-)

Ooops, photocopier has gone quiet, must be a paper jam.

POD

Ed Yourdon' classic book on structured analysis - online

2007-03-12T23:10:00.000+11:00

Just discovered this, its amazing. Ed Yourdon was one of the early proponents and popularisers of the structured approaches. he has put his 1989 book "Structured Analysis" up on the web in wiki format - so anybody can help update it. Its an astonishing resource. Check it out. While we aren't concentrating on structure analysis the stuff in the introduction is perfect for the first part of the course and some of the stuff in the appendices is useful as well (not just for the unit, but later for your professional careers!)

Enjoy, POD

Podcasts coming

2007-03-12T11:27:00.000+11:00

Just in case you were wondering - a couple of new podcast interview's are in the works - stay tuned.

POD

Small world

2007-03-11T11:56:00.000+11:00

Doing a catch up on a few episodes of ZeFrank's the show and who should appear on Ze's show but a guy named Johnathan Coulton. Who's he - hes another internet mega star who wrote and sings the song code monkey. If you haven't heard that listen here. And here is a link to The Show where he covers ZeFranks song's - with help from Ze in a way that only Ze could do.

Love the Internet, Laugh!

POD

The picture says it all.

2007-03-08T21:02:00.000+11:00

That's twice now in - what would it be - 9 days. Not really good enough.

POD

Week 2 and I feel sick

2007-03-08T14:05:00.000+11:00

What a week. Still feeling ordinary but slowly getting better.

Somehow I got through the lecture. A lot in week 2 so it was the wrong week not be be feeling well. I wasted too much time at the start grinding through the introduction instead of getting the the middle bit but I caught by breath half way through and did a better job of the second half, thank goodness. Anyway the Caulfield group stayed awake and hung in there with me (thank you), I hope the folks who decide to listen on-line are just as forgiving :-)

The highlight of the week was the studio. Boy did my groups do well - I hope the other studio groups went at the task with even half the enthusiasm of my group. They worked hard last week - which was a good sign - but by the time they got to this week they seemed ready to go right at the start and then when they did the presentations did a really good job. Of course they were nervous, and stumbled over some things and somethings didn't quite work out but given the short time frame, that the task isn't graded they did great. As I told them, the more they present the better they'll get. Some used Powerpoint - to great effect - and others just talked. I had a good variety of styles of models developed. Some took a classical systems decompositional approach, one divided the task up with an historical perspective and then look at pros and cons of that and the other look at the structure at a high level and then took vertical slices through the system- the food, the people, the links, the regulators etc. All excellent, and helps to show the point I wanted the exercise to make, which is that most people are quite good at doing analysis and modelling. Something we will need to remind everybody as the semester progresses!

Next week isn't so hectic, already have my slides prepared and my head around the structure of my talk and some examples primed and ready to discuss, now just to get well enough so I can deliver!

POD

I hate photocopiers

2007-03-04T12:05:00.000+11:00

Just in the office - as per usual doing my photocoping on Sunday - when there is no queue. But let me say - I HATE PHOTOCOPIERS.

There I feel better now.

POD

12 weeks to go

2007-03-01T12:03:00.000+11:00

Well week 1 is off an running.

Lecture went OK. Nothing much can go worng but its important in the first week to make the right impression. The main thing is to get people interested in the subject and looking forward to the unit. Without doing that it can be a bit of a slog for everybody. Anyway, people laughed at the right times (with me rather than at me) and seemed to pay attention through the whole thing (which is no mean feat in a 2 hour lecture) so I'm happy with the start we are off to.

My tutorial went well. I have a really nice bunch who just got down and started working - looking forward to seeing their presentations next week. Also good that everybody seems enthusiastic - if not a little anxious - about blogging. Already I've read some good blog posts and some comments here and there.

Also have updated the podcast - with an interview with a friend and colleague who just happened to drop by so I spent 10 minutes talking to him abut his work. Lots of hassle working on the audio though. I'm going to have to get a better Mic rather than the one I use. I can smooth the audio and make it listenable - and the file side reasonable but there is still quite a hum in the background. I guess I'll learn as I go along.

I'm very happy with the way the lecture recording has gone. Took me ages to sync jpgs of my lecture slides to the audio stream but the result is worth it I think. Golly, I hope people use it. And the file size goes from 400meg - the library's version - to 10 meg inc. the slides - so that's quite a saving for everybody and I think I managed to keep reasonable audio quality.

Anway, on to week 2. Got to get my head around the lecture (lot of material to cover next week so I need to have my head wrapped around it, got to try to make my explainations of things good but quick.)

POD

Week 1 already

2007-02-25T11:43:00.000+11:00

We'lll not quite, but as I'm writing this I'm photocopying my first weeks handout, tomorrow morning is the dreaded first week. Not that there is anything much to dread really, the first few weeks always pass without any problems and week 1 espcially - just just a bit of a culture shock to have the campus filled with students again.

Also just finished recording the first podcast episode - just me, ususually I'll be interview ing people but I can't post it yet. The mp3 software I use on my amazing Macbook has some bug and generates large and useless files, I'll have to export the file and take it to my home computer before I can create an mp3 that is suitable for uploading. Won't get that done till tonight.

Hope week 1 goes OK for you and you settle back into the swing of study right away.

POD
P.S. In the lecture, when I or your lecturer says to go buy the text, we mean go and buy the text! Do it as soon as you can.