Team and Overview
In this master's-level project course you develop a larger software system in a team, working with the architectures, tools and automation practices that characterise advanced software systems. Your team proposes its own project, agrees on a project contract, implements it over the semester, and defends its progress in Management Reviews.
- Course number
- 188.910 — Projekt (PR), 4.0 semester hours, 6.0 ECTS, Presence, continuous assessment
- Course lead
- Jürgen Cito
- Lecturers
- Stefan Biffl, Kristof Meixner, Peter Frühwirt, Wolfgang Krebs, Dietmar Winkler
- Assistants
- Michael Schröder, Markus Böck, Nathanael Nussbaumer, Jakob Valentin Hoffmann
- Course email
- ase-pr@se.tuwien.ac.at
- Preliminary discussion
- Thu 01.10.2026, 16:00 - 17:00, Informatikhörsaal - ARCH-INF
- Course catalog
- Official course listing in TISS (194.148, WS 2026/27)
- TUWEL
- TUWEL course — announcements, materials and submissions
- Institute
- E194 — Institute of Information Systems Engineering
Registration
Important! Registration for this course runs through TISS, from 20.09.2026 00:00 until 05.10.2026 16:00 (strict deadline!).
All students registered in TISS until the deadline will have access to the course in
TUWEL.
Deregistration is possible until 05.10.2026 16:00.
Prerequisites
We expect basic knowledge of software engineering and project management, as taught in the corresponding bachelor's courses — for example Software Engineering Projekt (194.148).
The necessary qualifications are checked at the beginning of the course by means of an entry test, which must be passed.
Timetable
The following timetable lists all important dates for the course (preliminary discussion, entry test, tutor meetings, management reviews, ASE Day).
If a deadline is listed on a certain date, assume it is due at 23:55 that day unless specified otherwise.
Scheduled dates
| Date | Content | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Thu 01.10.2026 16:00 - 17:00 |
Kickoff | Informatikhörsaal - ARCH-INF |
| 05.10.2026 16:00 | Registration and deregistration deadline in TISS | |
Further milestones
| Date | Content | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 05.10.2026 | Entry test | Must be passed to continue |
| 07.10.2026 | Retry Entry test | Must be passed to continue |
| 12.10.2026 | Group Finding Deadline | |
| 21.10.2026 08:00 |
Deadline project proposal | |
| 21.10.2026 | Online proposal presentations | |
| 27.10.2026 - 30.10.2026 | Management Review 1 | Will be scheduled with your assistant |
| 07.12.2026 - 11.12.2026 | Management Review 2 | Will be scheduled with your assistant |
| 17.01.2027 | Upload video | ~5min presentation of your project |
| 18.01.2027 - 22.01.2027 | Management Review 3 | Will be scheduled with your assistant |
Course Structure
The course consists of an entry test and a project phase. The entry test is a prerequisite for the project phase, and needs to be completed positively in order to continue with the course. The project phase is a group project, where you will work in teams of 4-6 students on a self defined software project.
Entry Test (5pts)
The entry test will be done in class and is repeatable once. You will have 45 minutes to solve several multiple choice exercises. Each exercise, has a short problem description with a piece of defective code written in Java. We will show you 4 pull requests that supposedly fix the code. You will need to bring your own Laptop! Small screen tablets or phones are not suitable for this test. It is necessary to pass the entry test to continue with the course.
Group finding
After the the retry entry test, everyone who completed the test positively will have 5 days to submit group preferences in TUWEL. You can use the group finding forum in TUWEL to find teammates and discuss project ideas. PLEASE NOTE: these are preferences. We will try to accommodate them, but cannot guarantee that everyone will get their preferred teammates or project.
Project finding
After we assigned you to your final group, you will have 1 week to submit a project proposal. The propasal should contain a short description of the project, the technologies you will use, and the features you will implement, described through user stories. You are free to choose your own project, but it should be a substantial project relevant to an advanced software engineering course.
Technologies
You will be free to choose the technologies you want to use for your project. However, we recommend to use technologies that are widely used in industry and have a large community. Further we recommend to choose the technologies based on the project, your teams experience and to discuss your ideas and choices with your tutor. This will help you to get feedback and avoid problems later on.
Development
Overall the development phase will last about 12 weeks which will be split into 5 sprints. During this time, you will have weekly meetings with your tutor. The development phase starts after the first Management Review and ends with the final Management Review.
Group Project Grading (95pts)
While this is a group project, grading will happen for each individual student and continuously throughout the project. Your grade consists of the following components:
- Sprint Reviews (5x 10pts)
- Technical Review (1x 10pts)
- Overall Project Success (30pts)
- Video Presentation (5pts)
Sprint Reviews are made by your tutor. For each sprint your tutor will look at 1-2 merge requests per student and provide a grading recommendation based on the quality of your code, your adherence to the user story and technical guidelines as well as best practices taught in the course.
The Technical Review will be conducted by a different tutor than your own. In the week before Management Review 2 another tutor will look at one merge request for each student and provide a grading recommendation based on the same criteria as the sprint reviews.
The Overall Project Success will be assessed by your assistant during the final Management Review. The assessment will be based on the quality of your final product, the completeness of your project and the overall success of your team.
Grading
The grading consists of 5% from the Entry Test and 95% from the Group Project.
Both phases must be completed positively (≥ 50%) for a positive completion of the course.
The examination mode is continuous assessment (prüfungsimmanent).
Grading scale
All partial and final performances are graded on the same scale from 0 to 100 percent:
- S1: 88%-100%
- G2: 75%-87.99%
- B3: 63%-74.99%
- G4: 50%-62.99%
- N5: 0%-49.99%
Academic Honesty
We expect all students to do their own work. Where work is done in teams, every team member is expected to contribute substantially and to be able to explain and defend any part of the submission, including parts primarily written by others.
Any kind of plagiarism, including submitting code or text authored by someone else without attribution, sharing solutions between teams, or presenting work from a previous edition of the course as your own, will result in expulsion from the course with a grade N5 (Nicht Genügend).
AI Usage Policy
You may use AI tools in this course. You remain responsible for every artifact you submit, including code, tests and models. You must understand your work, be able to explain your decisions and take clear ownership of the result, whether or not AI helped produce it.
Submit a written reflection on your AI use for each unit of grading: one for each sprint. State whether you used AI, what you used it for, and how you checked and incorporated its output. If you did not use AI, say so in your reflection.
Reflection Prompts
For your 200-word reflection, you may consider the following prompts to guide your writing:
- How did you evaluate the AI's output?
- Did you need to correct or refine its suggestions? Why?
- Did any responses surprise you? Why?
- Did the AI speed up tasks you could have done yourself? Which?
- Did the AI provide information or explanations you did not previously have? What?