Planning your Work-based Project

It’s time for us to think about your work-based project – this will be the largest part of the assessment for the software development course, and will focus on you putting the skills that you have learned throughout the course into practice on a real project in your workplace. This guide is designed to help you write a project plan that summarises how you will demonstrate the relevant skills, and this will be shared with the assessment body BCS (the British Computer Society) for them to confirm that they are happy with your plan.

What will the plan look like?

You will work with your manager and devise, with our help, a project plan that sees you doing tasks as part of your day job across the next 8 weeks (taking half a day per week, and a further 9th week to complete a report) which will demonstrate your ability to perform in all the relevant areas. Your project is to be based around a customer’s or stakeholder’s specification that responds to:

  • a specific problem
  • a recurring issue
  • an idea/opportunity

Your project plan:

  • will be short – typically no longer than 500 words
  • will include the stakeholder specification
  • will outline the project plan, including high level implementation steps, time frames and date of the projects submission
  • will demonstrate how you’ll meet the relevant criteria
    • this will be supported with a mapping guide to explicitly cross check your plan against the criteria

What will the project itself look like?

The final project (project report) is an electronic report that will contain (as necessary):

  • narrative
  • coded artefacts
  • infographics and diagrams

The document word limit is 4500(+-10%). This does not include appendices, references or diagrams.

The following sections are required, and can form a good initial outline of your project report:

  • introduction
  • scope of the project (including how success is going to be measured, ie KPIs)
  • project plan
  • consideration of legislation, regulation, industry and organisational policies, procedures and requirements
  • analysis and problem solving in response to challenges within the project
  • research and findings
  • project outcomes explained by referencing artefacts within the appendices to convey the software solution and design of the software development outputs
  • recommendations and conclusions
  • an explanation of how the stages of the Software Development Lifecycle which are involved in the project have been evidenced e.g.
    • Planning
    • Analysis
    • Design
    • Implementation/Build
    • Test
    • Deploy
    • Maintain
  • an appendix that contains:
    • artefacts of relevant code
    • visual infographics (such as software solution and design of software development outputs)
    • a mapping of evidence to the relevant KSBs

While working on the project, you may work as part of a team. However, the project report is to be your own work and is to reflect your own role and contributions.

Timelines

When you have your project plan, and you and your manager are happy, you will enter the “Gateway” to the End Point Assessment (EPA). We will agree start dates with you but IQA and BCS require up to a total of three weeks to sign off your documentation from the point of submission, and from your start point you will have 9 weeks to undertake the planned activities, during which you will be spending half a day a week on average to gather evidence and write your project report. You should spend the 9th week completing your projcet report and gathering any outstanding evidence; you will need to prepare and share with the assessor:

  • the stakeholder’s specification for the work
  • a short analysis of how you have met the KSBs – in the form of another mapping
  • any specific technical outputs – source code, deployment scripts, configuration files etc.

Finally, the project will conclude with the “project questioning”; a one hour call during which you will be asked about what you did during the work-based project based on the report you submit, to see how you have met the assessment criteria.

What time do I get?

Your employer will provide you with at least 2 days a week to work on this project for the assessment period, which will usually comprise mostly of your day-to-day work.

What are the relevant criteria?

If you’re keen to see the full list, all the Knowledge, Skills and Behaviour (KSB) criteria can be viewed on the Institute For Apprenticeships documentation with those to be checked as part of this project listed in the EPA standard.

In order to gain a pass in the work based project you must meet the following criteria:

  • Explains the roles and responsibilities of all people working within the software development lifecycle, and how they relate to the project (K2)
  • Outlines how teams work effectively to produce software and how to contribute appropriately (K6)
  • Outlines and applies the rationale and use of algorithms, logic and data structures. (K9, S16)
  • Reviews methods of software design with reference to functional/technical specifications and applies a justified approach to software development (K11, S11, S12)
  • Creates logical and maintainable code to deliver project outcomes, explaining their choice of approach. (S1)
  • Analyses unit testing results and reviews the outcomes correcting errors. (S4)
  • Identifies and creates test scenarios which satisfy the project specification (S6)
  • Applies structured techniques to problem solving to identify and resolve issues and debug basic flaws in code (S7)
  • Reviews and justifies their contribution to building, managing and deploying code into the relevant environment in accordance with the project specification (S10)
  • Establishes a logical thinking approach to areas of work which require valid reasoning and/or justified decision making (B2)
  • Describes how they have maintained a productive, professional and secure working environment throughout the project activity (B3)

In order to gain a distinction in the work based project you must meet the following criteria:

  • Compare and contrast the requirements of a software development team, and how they would ensure that each member (including themselves) were able to make a contribution (K6)
  • Evaluates the advantages and disadvantages of different coding and programming techniques to create logical and maintainable code (S1)
  • Analyses the software to identify and debug complex issues using a fix that provides a permanent solution. (S7)
  • Evaluates different software development approaches in order justifying the best alignment with a given paradigm (for example, object oriented, event driven or procedural) (S11)

Concerns

  • My role won’t give me the opportunity to demonstrate any of these competencies:
    • If your day role does not usually touch any of these technologies, you may be able to work with your manager to find another team or project to work on as part of this synoptic project with the time allocated, in order to give you access to a wider variety of tasks. Consider whether any of the sample briefs more closely fit your role, or a role that you might be able to work within.

Prior to the workshop

We will be looking at creating a project brief in the workshop – As such, please look to confirm the project you are working on.