CS257 Software Design
Wednesday, 9 April 2025

+ Next
- Project overview
- What makes teams work and not work?
- Getting started with your project teams
- Projects
    - Look at possible datasets
    - Assignment (due Friday): submit your team's top two dataset ideas
    - Assignment (due Monday): project proposal
- Test-driven development
    - What is it and why do we care?
    - Lab (due Thursday)

+ Overview of the big project
- Full-stack architecture
    - Database (using postgresql)
    - API (written in python using Flask)
    - Web endpoints to deliver pages
    - HTML, CSS, Javascript
- Activities
    - specify requirements
    - mockup user interface
    - design and implement database
    - design and implement API for accessing the data
    - design and implement page structure
    - user testing, code reviews, and revisions
    - ...
- Dataset attributes
    - at least two different ways of searching or interacting
        with the data
    - something interesting
- Example datasets
    - Good: animal species in US National Parks
        search by animal name, animal category (bird/insect/...), latin name, park
        display on map or in lists as appropriate
    - Good: movies (or songs, or books,...)
    - Good: historical weather data
        (but can sometimes be not granular enough)
    - Good: women's healthcare facilities
    - Good: Pokemon or Magic cards
    - Good: voting data if it's granular enough;
        state totals for a single race not so interesting
    - Good: sports statistics
    - Bad: this weird UFO dataset some students used a few years ago;
        all the content was dates plus prose descriptions of incidents 
    - Meh: recipes are really hard to deal with when you're learning all this other stuff
        like the UFOs, the bulk of a recipe is in a prose description (in most datasets, anyway)

+ What makes an effective team?
- Respect your teammates
- Clear goals
- Communication
    - getting shared understanding
    - speak up when something is going wrong
    - decide which communication medium you're using
        and read and respond promptly
- make a plan for getting stuff done
- Reliability: if you say you're gonna do it, you do it
- be respectful of your teammates' time
    - show up on time
    - negotiate meetings and deadlines in good faith
    - [rare but destructive] avoid doing other people's
        work for them
- distributing work fairly

+ Meet your team
- Hi, who am I? who are you?
- What kind of data are we interested in?
- Look at the websites-of-data together

+ Test-driven development
- Overview
- Lab