Capstone milestones

2026-10-08

The capstone is worth 45% and is evaluated via milestones. The intent is to reduce single-deadline risk and to provide multiple feedback/intervention points.

Teams and artifacts

Teams: up to 5 students.
Deliverables: both a group submission and an individual report.
Evidence: signed git history + AI interaction log + reproducible artifacts.
Oral exam hooks (required structure): maintain oral-exam-hooks/hooks.md as a compact index of claims, failure scenarios, and tradeoffs.
Course GitHub organization: https://github.students.cs.ubc.ca/CPSC416-2025W-T2

Proposed milestone breakdown (sums to 45%)

5%: Proposal + domain (or nomination) + MVP + risk register
8%: Design spec (failure model → protocol → invariants) + review plan
5%: Formal model/spec (TLA+/PlusCal preferred; alternatives allowed with justification)
7%: Prototype checkpoint (end-to-end vertical slice; measurable behavior under at least one failure)
5%: Failure evaluation (fault injection / adversarial scenarios + results + interpretation)
10%: Final group submission (demo-ready repo + report + reproducibility package)
5%: Individual report (what changed, what was learned, and what would be done next)

Early exploration cadence (baseline)

In the prior offering, the capstone used short individual weekly reports early in the term to force exploration before students committed to a specific direction. Team declaration happened mid-stream. This offering preserves that intent via weekly reports and a team declaration deadline.

Key dates (2026)

Weekly reports: due Thu at 11:30 PT (unlock after the previous report) through 2026-03-19
Team declaration: 2026-02-12 23:59 PT
Code submission: 2026-03-27 23:59 PT
Design reflection: 2026-04-10 23:59 PT
Final video/reflection: 2026-04-24 23:59 PT