6.171 Client Questionnaire

Digital photo titled roman-amphitheater-jump-2

Client Questionnaire

for "Software Engineering of Internet Applications" at MIT

Our next course runs from February through May 2006. Please apply by January 30, 2006 if you would like to be a client for this semester.

We'd like you to consider being a client for our students in MIT Course 6.171, "Software Engineering of Internet Applications". Our students are generally seniors majoring in Computer Science. You'd be assigned a team of 2 or 3 of these young engineers for a 13-week project.

What's in it for you and your organization? By the end of the semester you will have a working prototype that should have been launched to a set of test users and might be ready for use by a wider audience. The quality of the work delivered depends to some extent on how well you communicate with your team. The average project is usually better than most commercially developed database-backed Web sites. In any case it is very difficult to design a good system without building something that works well enough to test with real users. After 13 weeks with your team you'll have a very good idea of what you want and don't want in the final application.

Your organization will gain exposure to a bright group of young people who are soon to graduate from MIT. Perhaps you'll want to offer one of them a job and what better way to decide whether or not a person is easy to work with?

What's in it for you personally? Here's an opportunity to work with smart, fun, interesting individuals. An MIT student will never bore you to death with a story about kitchen renovation, rearing toddlers, etc. They're free, happy, and optimistic for the most part. If it is convenient for you, you'll be welcome in the classroom at several points during the semester and perhaps to the campus for informal meetings with your team. I.e., an opportunity to get out of the office and stroll around amidst the Henry Moore and Calder sculptures on the MIT lawns.

What must you do? Be available via email and telephone at least once per week for 13 weeks. Be willing to respond within 24 hours to a team request that you look at a Web page that they've built and provide feedback. In 2006, the semester starts on February 7 and runs through May 18. By February 14, 2006 we can tell you whether or not your project has been selected for the semester. Please remember that the university calendar is unforgiving. Stuff does not "slip to next week".

Examples of previous projects

All of these systems are still up and running as of November 2005.

Sign me up!

To apply for a student team, we ask that you send an email message

To: philg@mit.edu
Subject: proposed client project for 6.171

In the email we'd like answers to the following questions:

Name of organization, contact person, phone numbers, email
What's the spirit of the project? We're looking for systems in which users interact with other users. An ideal project is an online learning community in which the users share a common purpose and the more experienced will answer questions from the less experienced.
How important is this system to your organization? How come it hasn't been built yet?
What kind of content do you have for the site? Do you have books or articles in electronic form that can serve as a magnet to attract users?
How do you expect to attract the first users to the site that our students build? In the long run how do you expect to bring users to the application?
Do you have a budget or other resources for sustaining the application in the long term? I.e., suppose that the student team builds you a perfectly functional system, how would your organization keep it going?

Thanks.

Intellectual Property

If it was your content at the beginning of the course, it remains yours at the end. MIT does not ask for any rights to intellectual property that you bring to the class or that is developed during the class. As for the software that your student team builds, that is typically owned by the students who give the client a royalty-free license to use their work. The effect of this arrangement is that your organization is free, without payment, to use the application built by our students. At the same time, our students are able to reuse whatever they've personally built (i.e., not content that you've provided) in subsequent projects should they so wish.

philg@mit.edu