To the students and mentors, I've written the following on several students' proposals, but think it's useful to make them public, and I've learned some things since writing them.
A couple of students have provided links to mockups of user interfaces and so on. I think it's useful to provide a mockup as a linked object, but you need to provide verifiable documentation of its content such as the commit ID in a git repo so that we can confirm you don't change it after the deadline date. Also, it's possible to inline images in the proposal (I couldn't access the source so I'm not sure how, but several students have figured out how :-). A major problem with all proposals is lack of good "milestones". A *milestone* is a precise description of the completion of a task which can be verified objectively. Exactly how to phrase milestones depends on many things. In many cases, something like "design document committed to repo, submitted to and approved by mentor" (ie, verification by another person) is appropriate. Or, in the case where a bunch of input functions have been coded, "valid input documented and validation functions implemented for all input fields" is something you can check yourself. Without "sharp" milestones, it's hard to determine whether you are keeping to your proposed schedule, or if you are leaving "10%" to be done later. Writing good milestones is hard. Many professionals can't (or don't bother). But you will find it very useful when making proposals in your work, or later when managing others in larger projects. Now is a good time to start. Steve _______________________________________________ Mailman-Developers mailing list Mailman-Developers@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-developers Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-developers%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-developers/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9
