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.
- 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:
| 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 to challenge the students decisions. Apart from this, I review and steer the scientific writing of the final thesis.
- Weekly supervision meetings, which the group runs itself, opening with its stand-up.
- 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.