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CSE Capstone Platform Ecosystem

The CSE Capstone Platform brings together multiple CSED projects to support the full lifecycle of a capstone course:

  • Collecting student skills and project preferences
  • Forming balanced teams and project assignments
  • Managing Git-based project work and tracking team activity

This page focuses on how key services integrate.

Core Components

  • Capstone Survey – collects skills, experience, and project preferences from students.
  • Psephos – provides a reusable survey engine backend.
  • UMACS – central identity and authorization service for users and apps.
  • OptiTeam / Student Team Formation – uses survey data and skills to compute team assignments.
  • SkillNet – models student skill graphs for richer team formation signals (future integration).
  • Git Task Server – manages Git-based tasks and repositories for teams.
  • T4 (Time & Task Tracker) – analyzes work patterns and time-on-task across repositories.

High-Level Architecture

flowchart TD
  Students[Students] --> CapSurvey[Capstone Survey]
  CapSurvey --> Data[(Skills & Preferences Data)]
  Data --> Psephos[Psephos<br/>Survey Engine]
  Data --> OptiTeam[OptiTeam<br/>Team Formation]
  OptiTeam --> Teams[Teams & Project Assignments]

  Teams --> GitTask[Git Task Server]
  GitTask --> Repos[Project Repositories]
  Repos --> T4[T4<br/>Time & Task Tracking]

  UMACS[UMACS<br/>Auth Service] --> CapSurvey
  UMACS --> OptiTeam
  UMACS --> GitTask
  UMACS --> T4

Typical Flow

  1. Survey & Data Collection
  2. Students complete the Capstone Survey.

  3. Responses are stored via Psephos and exported as structured data.

  4. Team Formation

  5. OptiTeam ingests survey data (and, in the future, SkillNet features) to generate team–project assignments.

  6. Instructors review and adjust assignments as needed.

  7. Repository Provisioning

  8. Team assignments are passed to Git Task Server, which provisions per-team repositories.

  9. Ongoing Work & Analytics

  10. Teams work in their repos;
  11. T4 analyzes commit activity, issues, and pull requests to provide workload and time-on-task insights.

Throughout, UMACS provides a shared auth layer for student and instructor access.