Request for Clients
We are currently looking for "clients" to offer projects for our students. This provides valuable project experience for our students and provides a way of connecting clients with possible future employees (they may even produce some useful software for you!). Each group will have 3-4 members in them and will work on the project from the beginning of March to the end of October, for most students this course forms one quarter of their annual course load. Each group will have a single 4th year student who will be the group leader. Multiple groups will work on the same project, and you will be able to compare and select the best of these. As a client you will mainly liaise with the group leaders giving them direction in terms of project objectives, specification, requirements, etc. but also in terms of mentoring, encouraging, and aiding them as they take on the project.The project should not form a "core" part of your business. This is because there is so much variation in what students produce in these projects. And these are students who are just developing their programming and software engineering skills. So the best projects are ones that explore new ideas for your organisation (e.g. "We don't have the resources to develop this idea but we could explore its viability with a team of students and if it works we could gather the needed resources to turn it into a system we use/sell.") or you wish to develop/extend a software tool that your organisation uses internally (e.g. "Our organisation makes use of this open source tool, however, it is limited in a number of ways. It would be great to get a team of students to work on this.") Also it is best not to include ideas in the projects that you do not want disclosed to others, as although you may get the students to sign a non-disclosure agreement, the students will need to present their work in workshops that have other students in them that will be doing other projects and these other student will have not signed the non-disclosure agreement. Also the project code that the group is working on will be stored on a central version control repository within the ANU (this gives us a unified way of monitoring each groups progress).
All students have access to standard Linux development environments. And will often have access to collection of other systems (windows boxes, iphones, macs, android phones, etc). However, if the project involves developing software on some more exotic system, then the client would need to provide access to such a system.
If you would like to put forward an ANU Software Engineering group project for 2013 please email Eric McCreath a short description of your project before 31/1/2013. Include in this description the following:
- A short overview of the project - 1 paragraph
- Computing skills involved in the project - 1 line (e.g. "Students will learn about web programming using Php." or "The project involves image processing and developing code in the c programming language.")
- How the project fits into your organisation - 1 short paragraph.
- Skills/background you have in software development and project management.
- Software/hardware resource required for the project and if you would provide them or expect the students to use their own - a short list
- How you expect the software to be licensed and any requirements on legal agreements between your organisation, the students, and the ANU (e.g. "The plan is to licence the software using a GPL licence, as such, no formal agreement needs to be signed between the parties." or "The final software will be proprietary and owned completely by our organisation, a standard version of the 'Agreement for a Student Project with and Industry Client' would need to be signed by the parties involved.")
Projects will be select to be offered to the students based on a number of factors such as: providing a balance of different types of projects to students, the organisations ability to mentor and help direct the students, the clarity of the project, an organisations track record in offering these projects, and the simplicity of any agreement between the group of students doing the particular project, the ANU, and the organisation.
Note a template for the standard agreement is available: ANU_Student_Project_Industry_Client_Agreement_2013 (or pdf).
