TDDD83 Bachelor Project: supervisor of startup-style product teams
- Period
- Jan 2026 – now
- Role
- Group supervisor (examiner: Martin Sjölund)
- Location
- Linköping University, B-huset (IDA)Campus Valla, 581 83 Linköping, Sweden
- Posted
Supervising teams of eight in LiU's 18-credit computer engineering bachelor project, where each group runs like a small startup: it pitches its own web-based business product, builds it with Scrum and evaluates it in a published bachelor thesis.
- Team of 8, self-organised with Scrum and no project manager
- Marketing plan and a funding pitch with a break-even case
- Four sprints, from team kick-off to a published thesis
- 2026: LIvent, an event discovery platform; a new group in spring 2027
TDDD83 is LiU's bachelor project in computer engineering: 18 credits, or 480 hours per student, over the spring semester. It joins software development with industrial economics. Each group of about eight students acts like a small startup. It comes up with its own product idea, argues for its market, pitches for funding, builds the product and evaluates it scientifically in a bachelor thesis published in DiVA.
How a group works like a startup
- Team: about eight students and no project manager. Roles such as Scrum master, architect or test lead spread the responsibility, but everyone develops, tests and writes.
- Product: a web-based business application of the group's own design, such as a marketplace or an e-shop, with a professional checkout, order history and admin views. A Flask back end and a JavaScript front end talk only through JSON.
- Market: a marketing plan, part of the thesis, judges whether the product could be economically viable, and its findings steer the backlog.
- Funding: at the end of Sprint 2 the group pitches to a financier, played by the examiner and the supervisor. The pitch covers the product vision (NABC), the risk analysis and when the product would break even on roughly 2 MSEK of development cost.
- Research: a research question grounded in the literature, turned into traceable requirements and answered by evaluating the finished system.
The semester runs as four Scrum sprints, with backlogs in Trello and code in GitLab:
| Sprint | Focus |
|---|---|
| 1. Startup and training | Labs, team kick-off, project plan with risk analysis |
| 2. Vision and report v1 | Prototype, product backlog and user stories, theory and method, marketing plan, funding pitch |
| 3. Implementation | Building the product in short iterations, demos, testing and reviewing another group's code |
| 4. Thesis and defence | Final report, opposition, a 30-minute presentation, individual experience summaries |
My role as supervisor
The course defines the supervisor as a coach, not a subject teacher: the job is to help the group work well, learn how to learn and solve its own problems, stepping in only when needed. It is the same stance I take in TDDC88: ask questions and let the students own the decisions.
- Weekly supervision meetings, which the group runs itself, opening with its stand-up. At the first one we agree on the ground rules for the semester.
- Financier at the Sprint 2 funding pitch, together with the examiner, probing the vision, the risks and the break-even case.
- Product demos at the supervision meetings throughout the implementation sprint.
- Thesis feedback on the first version, and an assessment of the version that goes to opposition, pointing out weaknesses and gaps.
In 2026 my group built LIvent, a map-based event discovery platform for Östergötland. Their thesis on iterative design and usability evaluation was defended on 26 May 2026 and is published in DiVA. I will supervise a new group in the spring 2027 course.