Your project should be designed to meet the needs of your employer. This means it shouldn't be "throwaway" work made up just for your assessment—it's better to choose something you would have been working on anyway. The project should be relevant to your role, and allow you to demonstrate that you have met the Knowledge, Skills and Behaviours required by the apprenticeship standard.
Ideally the project will be large enough to allow you to work on several different aspects of the software lifecycle (e.g. planning, designing, building, testing, releasing etc). However it must be done within 7 weeks, so it cannot be too large.
You do not have to complete the project on your own. It is supposed to be a real-world assessment and so it is expected that you will work as part of a wider team. However you must ensure that you meet the assessment criteria. Work completed by your teammates will not count.
When you enter the Endpoint Assessment (EPA) gateway you must submit a project proposal. Your assessor will review this proposal to ensure your project is appropriate—you will get sign off from them within 2 weeks. You will then have 9 weeks total to complete your project and submit your report after you receive sign off. (The project start date must be at least 2 weeks from the date you submit at Gateway).
The proposal should summarise what you will do in the project. This includes mapping to each of the KSBs. You will add a sentence or two next to each KSB to explain how you expect to map it.
Your project code will not be directly assessed. Instead you must write a report describing everything you did, and showing how you met the assessment criteria. There is a recommended structure to the report, which is described below.
You will have about 2 weeks to finish the report after completing your project. It should be 4500 words ± 10%. This word count is strictly enforced, so ensure you are within 4050-4950 words.
The report should include the following sections:
- an introduction
- the scope of the project
- a 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
- recommendations and conclusions
- explain what you did (if anything) for each stage of the Software Development Lifecycle e.g.
- Planning
- Analysis
- Design
- Implementation/Build
- Test
- Deploy
- Maintain
The main report should be a narrative—describing what you did at each stage. You should also include appendices containing any supporting material. This could be code samples you reference in the narrative, diagrams or infographics from the planning stage, the results of user research etc.
You will map the relevant Knowledge, Skills and Behaviours to your project in a project declaration form. Try to make it as easy as possible for the assessor to see how you have demonstrated each KSB.
Although you can work on the project as part of a team, you must write the project on your own. Try to only use "I" in your report. The assessor is not interested in what "we" did—they need things to be directly attributable to you.