DAEN 459
Capstone Senior Design Planning

Fall 2025

Description

First in a two-course sequence for the capstone senior design experience; formation of a senior design team, visitation with the team sponsor, preparation of the groundwork for the project, preparation of the project charter and collection or acquisition of initial set of data; provision of instructions on different aspects of capstone design, including ethics, design constraints, applicable standards, project management, report writing specifications and requirements, and oral and visual presentations.

Topics

"If you fail to plan, you plan to fail."

• Course intro, team formation
• Interaction with sponsor / site visit

• Project planning process, project charter components
• Preliminary data collection
• Developing the project charter
• Risk assessment and mitigation
• Data and architecture standards

• Engineering design, design constraints

• Project management principles
• Ethics

Milestones

"A goal without a plan is just a wish." Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

• Capstone collaboration agreement
• Initial meeting with sponsors
• First draft of project charter
• Strategic discussion with advisors
• Second draft of project charter
• Preliminary data collection
• Rehearsal presentations (w/ peers and advisors)
• Final project charter
• Signed by the sponsor
• Presentation (w/ peers and advisors if possible)
• Peer review

Resources/References

Textbooks

"In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable." Dwight D. Eisenhower

• Fundamentals of Data Engineering
• Designing Data-Intensive Applications
• The Data Warehouse Toolkit
• Data Engineering with Python

Playlists

"Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you're gonna get." Forrest Gump

• Jeff Su (YouTube)
• The Billion Dollar Code (Netflix)