Course Milestone Roadmap
Core Idea
You are not completing a series of independent assignments. You are building a single project throughout the semester.
Each milestone helps advance the project while developing communication, planning, technical skills, documentation, and teamwork. Work completed for one milestone should contribute to future milestones and, ultimately, your final project deliverables.
Milestone Timeline
- Sun 09/06 - MILESTONE Project Preferences
- Sun 09/13 - MILESTONE Project Organization
- Sun 09/20 - MILESTONE Exploration and Plan
- Sun 09/27 - MILESTONE Plan Video Storyboard
- Sun 10/04 - MILESTONE Plan Video
- Sun 10/11 - MILESTONE Outreach
- Sun 10/25 - MILESTONE Install Instructions
- Sun 11/01 - MILESTONE Second Video Storyboard
- Sun 11/08 - MILESTONE MVP Video
- Sun 11/15 - MILESTONE Reproducibility
- Sun 11/22 - MILESTONE Full Project Draft
- Sun 11/29 - MILESTONE Final Videos and Presentations
- Sun 12/06 - MILESTONE Final Project
Deadline Cadence
- All milestone assignments are published during the first week of class.
- One milestone is typically due each Sunday.
- Milestones are expected to be completed by the assigned deadline (no extensions).
The milestone schedule is intentionally provided early so teams can look ahead, identify long-lead tasks, and plan accordingly.
Successful teams rarely wait for a milestone to become urgent before beginning work.
Planning Ahead
Projects should not assume that work begins when a milestone is assigned.
Many milestones depend on work that may take days or weeks to complete, including:
- Community partner communication
- Data acquisition and cleaning
- Literature reviews
- Software installation and configuration
- Reproducibility workflows
- Testing and validation
- Documentation and reporting
Teams are encouraged to review all milestones early in the semester and identify activities that may require significant lead time.
One strategy used by many successful teams is to assign ownership of future milestones or major project activities. Ownership does not mean completing all of the work. Instead, the owner helps ensure that the team understands the requirements, plans ahead, identifies risks, and raises concerns before deadlines become urgent.
Teams may find it useful to report progress on assigned milestone areas during their weekly 3x3 reflections. This can help distinguish individual planning and accountability from the team’s shared progress reports.
Project Vocabulary
Several project management, software engineering, and data science terms are used throughout the course.
See:
Students are encouraged to review these definitions early in the semester and revisit them as new concepts are introduced.
Bottom Line
Milestones are project checkpoints, not isolated assignments.
Strong teams look ahead, identify open loops, define success criteria, assign ownership where appropriate, and use each milestone to move the project closer to a successful final outcome.
The most successful teams treat milestone work as living project documentation that evolves throughout the semester rather than a collection of one-time assignments.