Glossary

One word per thing, everywhere on this site. Each entry names the page that owns the rule. A “Not:” list is what the prose check rejects in the handbook, the syllabi and rubric files, and the staff runbook.

People

• Project partner: the person or organization the team builds for and who completes the partner evaluations; for a student-proposed project, the approved mentor, sometimes an instructor (For Students). Not: client, sponsor.
• Mentor: a professional or faculty member who advises a team. Every student-proposed project needs one; the mentor takes the project partner’s place, evaluations included, and is sometimes an instructor. A partner who is not technical might also need a technical mentor, who advises and does not evaluate (For Students).
• TA: a Teaching Assistant, written “Teaching Assistant (TA)” at first use on a page and TA after; each TA owns a set of teams and runs their TA check-ins.
• Instructor: the faculty running the course; instructors place students on teams (For Students) and run the resume meetings.
• The instruction team: instructors and TAs together, the handbook’s third-person name for the people who run the course. Not: teaching staff, course staff, teaching team, instruction staff.
• The class: every student in the course this year (For Students). Not: cohort.

Rhythm

• Term and week: how this site tells time, “fall, week 5” (Schedule).
• Sunday of week N: the day a submission due in week N is due, written “by Sunday of week 4” (Late Work, Absence, and Makeup); an evaluation survey’s close line names only the week. Not: end of week, end of the week, end of this week, end of fall week N.
• Late window: how long after its deadline a submission is still accepted, at a cost; each assignment states its own at the top of its page (Late Work, Absence, and Makeup). Not: late penalty.
• Sprint: the fixed development cycle, each ending in a sprint note and a demo. Not: sprint report, progress report.
• Stand-up: the team’s short recurring sync (Regular Stand-Up Meetings). Not: standup.
• TA check-in: the standing meeting between a team and its TA, where the team demos (Schedule marks the weeks). Not: cohort check-in.
• Demo day: the all-hands demo session; presenting earns extra credit, and every team takes one of the five across the academic year (Demo Day). The sprint demo a team gives in its own TA check-in is a different session.
• Resume meeting: the meeting with an instructor in fall and again in spring (Resume and Intent, Career and Individual Retrospective). Not: cohort meeting.
• Defense: the once-a-term live session where each student explains work they own (Defense).
• Expo: the spring showcase where teams present to the public (Engineering Expo).

Work and its evidence

• Living docs: the documents the repository must contain, kept current, and submitted at each checkpoint as a PDF matching a named commit (Repo Checkpoints lists them).
• Repo checkpoint and milestone: a repo checkpoint is the instruction team’s review of the repository at a named commit, four times a year; its milestone is what that checkpoint adds, which the Milestone met criterion scores (Repo Checkpoints). Not: term gate.
• Walking skeleton and “hello, production”: the thinnest end-to-end slice of the system, deployed for Repo Checkpoint 2’s milestone (Repo Checkpoint 2).
• Definition of Shipped and target level: the winter agreement with the project partner about what “shipped” means for this project, naming the level of the outcome ladder the team commits to (Definition of Shipped). Not: outcome type, project type, project category, target rung, rung.
• External prerequisite and lead time: something the project needs that the team doesn’t control (access, an agreement, an account, a review), and how long it takes to arrive (Definition of Shipped). Not: clock.
• Outcome ladder: the one spring scale for Verification and Validation, who ran the software (Project Partner Evaluation). Not: V&V ladder, category ladder.
• Individual contribution modifier: the per-student adjustment on sprint note points when the evidence falls short of the contribution minimum (Sprint Notes).
• Midterm Pulse and End-of-Term Survey: the two partner surveys each term (Project Partner Evaluation).
• Peer evaluation: the midterm and end-of-term surveys students complete about teammates each term; CATME is the end-of-term survey in spring, on five teamwork dimensions (Peer Evaluations).
• Inherited-codebase audit: the write-up a team produces when it starts in an existing codebase, checked at Repo Checkpoint 1 (Repo Checkpoints).

Projects

• Existing codebase: a predecessor team’s repository, a partner’s codebase, or an open-source project you contribute to; one situation with three origins (Repo Checkpoints). Not: legacy project.
• Student-proposed project: a project a student submitted through the portal, with an approved mentor (For Students). Not: student-driven.
• Multi-team project: one project with several teams, split negotiated with the project partner and written into each team’s Definition of Shipped.
• NDA project: a project whose agreement restricts what the instruction team or the public may see; each affected assignment page carries a short note (IP, NDA, and Licensing). Not: Track A, Track B.

Activities

• Workshop, Helps with: badges under an activity’s heading, beside Whole team and the effort (Reading the Badge Line). A Workshop activity runs in class and everyone does it (Workshop Activities); each Helps with badge names an assignment the activity prepares for and links the section saying which criterion it serves.