The defense scheduling is planned on the March, 9th, 2012. The room and exact schedules are provided HERE
for a non updated french version :  click here
The PFE (Projet de fin d'étude) is the last project before the final internship. contrary to internships, in such a project the student is not compelled to "produce" some deliverable but rather to acquire knowledge and know-how. This is a reason why these projects are not supposed to be remunerated, although it it still possible for a company to offer some reward in case of outstanding results. The total duration of this project is 36 open days. The PFE is separated in four distinct periods detailled here.
During this period, a continuous control is made by using Redmine (for more information visit: http://anubis.polytech.unice.fr/cours/2011_2012:si5:pfetool:start). Redmine is a tool where you have to create a project and which must be augmented with various documents depending on the type of project (for instance a document with the full specifications, another with the time scheduled for the different phases of the project realization, the various problems discovered, etc). At the end of the PFE, additionally to the working documents, a document that summarizes and explain the results is required. This document should stay short but must help the reading of the various documents on redmine. Moreover, the defense of the PFE consists also in an oral presentation. It is important to notice that the evaluation can use the Redmine tool to verify that all the concerned students have worked all along the PFE.
There are two kinds of PFEs: engineering PFE and Research PFE.
Engineering PFE
The objective of engineering PFE is twofold.
- First, this is an opportunity to work in a team, and as a team ! The team is formed by 3 or 4 students and the specifications they realize during the first period must clearly explain what are the incoming tasks and who is assigned to each task. Students must exploit the possibly concurrent tasks but must also define the synchronization points where integration is mandatory. They should also use cross testing in order to increase the confidence in the final realization.
- Second, as highlighted in the first item, the PFE is an opportunity to realize full specifications and to exploit them with a project management perspective. The students have to understand the benefits of such a specification phase. They are encouraged, but not forced, to follow a specific methodology like, for instance, Scrum, iterative development (RUP, RAD, ...), or any other software development process.
Research PFE
A research oriented PFE is a mean to discover the research domain by practicing it. Each research PFE project concerns one student only since research is naturally realized in an already existing team. The goal is then to realize an extended bibliography during the first period so that the first document is a view of existing approaches in the domain and the appropriation of this domain by the student. Based on this bibliography, the second period can either be a deep comparison between the existing approaches (survey like) or a proposition of an improvement motivated by the bibliography. In some domains, it can be based on the realization of an early prototype to give more confidence in the rationality of the proposed approach. |
