CS373 Fall 2021: Colette Montminy : Final Entry
Week 14
1. How well do you think the course conveyed those takeaways?
I think that the course conveyed these takeaways well. A lot of the in class exercises or papers were geared toward showing examples of applying the different concepts, so it made it a lot easier to see how useful they are.
2. Were there any other particular takeaways for you?
The other main takeaway I had was how to work together as a group on a project. GitLab’s issue tracking, CI/CD, and sprint planning helped keep our group organized and working efficiently. Furthermore, other tools like Docker also helped keep our project clean and easy to deploy. I think knowing how to use these tools effectively will be extremely helpful moving forward, especially when going into industry.
3. How did you feel about cold calling?
I think the cold calling system works pretty well. It keeps you paying attention if you know that you could be called. It also allows for students to walk through a problem one-on-one with the professor and have a good opportunity to ask questions if they need to. Finally, I don’t think they’re as stressful as they sound once you get used to the system.
4. How did you feel about specifications grading?
I think the specifications grading works well on paper, but not within this practice. For example, the projects being graded based on the lowest section seems unnecessarily punishing. My group received Es on each section on one of our projects, but made a small mistake in our technical report that earned us an R. We then received an R overall for an otherwise perfect project. If we hadn’t reached out to the TAs, that could have potentially made us all get a B instead of an A in the course. I think it’s very unfair for such a small mistake to have such an impact on your overall grade. Beyond this, I also dislike the system since it can encourage you to do less work. For example, had I received an R on that project, I would have definitely missed more assignments because there would be no way to gain an A anymore.
5. How did you feel about help sessions and office hours?
I only attended help sessions for some of my TA weekly meetings and they seemed somewhat helpful. I never attended office hours, so I can’t speak to those.
6. How did you feel about the support from the TAs?
I think the TAs provided a lot of support. The Google docs they provided for each phase were immensely helpful and I can’t imagine how hard the course would’ve been without them. Additionally, they were helpful in answering questions on Discord and Ed discussion.
7. What required tool did you not know and now find very useful?
I found Docker to be really helpful and I was happy to learn more about it. It was really useful for working in a team and for creating pipelines on CI/CD. I didn’t work much on the backend so I didn’t get to use it too much, so I hope I can learn more about it in the future.
8. What’s the most helpful Web dev tool that your group used that was not required?
I don’t think we used any tools that weren’t required. One of the minor tools that I used specifically was the Chrome extension XPath Helper. This allowed for me to point my cursor at an object and gain its xpath, which helped a lot with creating Selenium tests.
9. How did you feel about your group having to self-teach many, many technologies?
I felt a bit lukewarm about it. I think it was fun to be able to create the project how we wanted and to have certain members specialize in things, but I think this also backfired. I was really interested in learning more about backend, but I wasn’t able to work on it since other members were better at it and were fast enough at it to get the projects done on time. I think if some of the technologies were taught in class then I would have had a better experience overall.
10. Give me your suggestions for improving the course.
I think one main suggestion I could give is to replace some of the reading papers. A lot of them were really OOP based and were pretty old. There are great articles about some of the tools that we’re required to use on the projects or other SWE principles that I feel like would have been a lot more useful to read instead of the ones that were assigned. Beyond that, I think the way the Canvas quizzes were handled were very confusing. It was hard to know when you had to turn the first try on the quiz. I feel like it would be easier on students if the quiz was a normal quiz that opened at 11:00am and closed at 11:04am, and then could be opened for a second attempt that would close within the next four minutes. I’m not 100% sure how this works on the backend on Canvas (or if it’s even possible), but I think something like this would make the quizzes a lot less stressful.