CS619 VU final project viva Experience

Sunday, March 17, 2013

CS619 VU final project viva Experience

I reached the campus at 8:35am. They asked me to sit in waiting hall. A lady came at 9:00 and said viva will be held at like 9:30am online, through video conference. Then she asked me to get my CPU to lab. There she said the cable pin they had to connect to whole system was not going in my CPU’s port. I have a graphic card inserted, bros play games etc. So I told her my brother is in car he can sort the cable matter out. That insane woman said no no, my staff guy will do it. Then she asked me to wait. She asked the guy who came after me to go & take viva.

He came back after 50min & scared me saying they asked him too many questions & he had an argument with supervisor because supervisor was quite annoying & asked too many questions from coding & asked him to change the coding as well. He did in PHP. Next, the lady called the next guy, then next girl, then next guy. At 11:30am, she came to me & said your cable cannot be connected. I really want to swear at her because she could have told me 3 hrs ago, my brother would have gone & get the cable. anyway I told her I have a back up laptop (only if she told me before) so I can take viva, stupid woman.

Then I took the laptop & went there. She held the cable & said “oh it doesn’t go with this one too” and I lost it right there, “is this a joke, is it only my machines are out of world or what?” then she loosed the pins on sides and said “oh please please do not make noise m fixing” dammit, then she says “oh its done”. Then I sat on chair, my laptop in front of me. I opened the presetation. There were two guys.One was the supervisor & the other one was someone I don’t know. I started with introduction. He asked me to go to Actors catalogue.

My procedure was when I open a diagram I will first define the heading (e.g what are actors) & then explain diagram. So they didn’t ask me to define anything. Next he asked me “which tool you used to make this diagram” I told him “MS power point” (yeah beat that nigga) anyway, sorry for that, next he asked me to go to sequence diagram. He asked me what was the vertical bars and the dotted lines, what was difference between use case diagram & sequence diagram. Next he asked me to go to ERD, he asked me for an example of Many to Many which I couldn’t tell, I asked for a moment to think he said its ok. He asked me what was PK, FK, & candidate key. I told him 2 but said I don’t remember candidate key. He asked 3rd form of normalization, i told him it was long time ago.

He asked to what extent you should normalize. I told him you have to find a balance between performance & reducing redundant data etc. Then class diagram, he asked what relationships are there just name them. He asked diff between aggregation & composition. Then he asked me to open architectural diagram. He said where is the business layer. I told him “these are the approved diagrams, approved by supervisor, I did not want to add or chnage anything so if supervisor wanted a business logic layer, he should have mentioned at that time”. Next he asked me what tool I used for presentation layer development, which was Visual studio 2010 in my case.

Then he said why you have MS SQL server as one layer & MS SQL management studio as data storage so I explained to him that server & database are two different things, they are not one, even if you use same tool for both so I separated the layer. Then he said go to your code. He asked me to submit a link twice & then said why is it submitting twice, where is the check, I said I didn’t know how to do that I only know about the validation checks available in VS2010. Then he asked me to add categories & asked where was the code part that adds the categories to database. I showed him.

He asked me favourite subject & I said database so this time the other guy asked why we need to denormalize after normalization. I mentioned I have told before too & just explained it a bit. I’m sure they were satisfied with my performance in presentation & my knowledge of my presentation & diagrams. I’m not sure they liked my application because of missing validation etc. I might pass anyway. who knows.

thank you if you have read it all, you have a heart of lion if you did
Cheers & good lucks

This bit is from September 3rd, before viva result was announced on September 11.

From what we have read above (or written in my case), we can definitely establish a fact that there are some very important facts about viva day in terms of being able to take the viva at all, Your PC/laptop which is compatible with their system. Since in Islamabad & probably some other cities too, they have to take viva in a video conference kind of setting where they have this TV screen, connected to your PC/Laptop & another screen which shows them (or half of them) from Lahore. The problem I faced was that my PC was of relatively new model & VU,in terms of technical equipment, is sort of old-fashioned (no offence intended). So make sure, I repeat again, MAKE SURE you have a back up plan B. It still gives me shudders even to think about this, what if that night before viva, I all of sudden had not decided to take the laptop with me?

My viva would have been rescheduled, means another week of stress,tension + no holiday (which was about going to Naraan & Kaghaan valley on 4th Sep BTW). So this is Thee most important thing ever. I suggest even visit your campus a day ahead & ask them to make sure your PC is successfully connected with their cable. If you are being nice I do not see a reason why they won’t just give you this small tiny, winy favour.

CS619 VU final project and my experience

Moving on, there are other MUST do’s:

1. Dress up formal. Please please do not appear in jeans boys. Its too unprofessional to appear for a project presentation in jeans. You have to at least look like a professional. It is said that interviewers make up their minds about you in first 5 minutes of interview. I guess same applies to Viva too. Your appearance is the first thing and no matter whoever tells you otherwise, appearances do matter.

2. Be calm, collected & patient. I’m a nerves freak. I panic a lot, and I mean A LOT. But make sure you have someone on phone, just to calm you down. I also owe a lot to my brother & my best friend who were both there to calm me down. Nerves ruin everything. Some people perform well under pressure. I’m just not one of those people,though.

3. Avoid argument & aggression. There was a guy,totally hyper & very very aggressive who had his viva before all of us. I remember on my viva day there were 5 students there. This guy went first & when he came back, we saw fireworks. They asked him literally 5 questions about code & also asked him to make about 3-4 changes in code. Just to mention his code was developed in PHP & he was very hyper & aggressive. May be this is the reason they tricked to trap him. He has done the project himself so that was in his favour,he could implement all the changes, but he argued a lot with them, he himself confessed. I don’t know his result, but hey if you are reading this, let me know how it went for you. Do not argue with the supervisors.

4. If you do not know something, please shut up & smile. I have seen people trying to make things on their own.The supervisors sitting in front of you are being paid to analyze your skills & knowledge so you better be careful about what you say. They asked me about candidate key, I simply said “Its been longer than a year now,but I assure you I scored really good in DBMS”. They asked me this very question twice, once at end, once in DB diagram, & my answer was same both times. Be prepared for what you have to say when they ask something you do not know. When you don’t know, please for Heavens’ sake admit it, instead of fighting it.

5. Prepare your presentation & diagrams yourself. If you have got it done, make sure you know each & every heading on each & every slide. When you start your presentation, or any slide they ask you to go to, always start with explaining the heading. This gives them an idea that you are well-prepared. Do not give them a chance to ask a question, explain everything beforehand.

In ERD, you must know about types of relationships. He asked me about an example of many-to-many & after giving one wrong example I bit my tongue & said “I need some time to come up with an example”. So just charm them when you know you are wrong. be nice, smile a lot (without looking like a fool) & don’t be a statue just sitting there & replying like a robot with auto-fed messages.

In DB diagram, you must know Foreign key, primary key, normalization, denormalization, why we denormalize after normalization. He also asked me the full query for Insert operation, so revise the queries too.

In Class diagram, you must know association, aggregation & composition.

In sequence diagram, the dotted line, the process bar, the long vertical bar, make sure you know it.

If you answer 80% of questions about presentation correctly, congratulations you are in safe zone now.

Now moving to coding:

1. If they ask you has anyone helped you or anything, internet is your only friend and that is it. I have seen people who mentioned “friends” & got in trouble. Simply state I learnt it all on internet.

2. If you have got your coding done (c’mon most of us have) then make sure you watch videos or procedures about each step involved. e.g “how to create registration page in VS2010″. This will give you an idea, where text boxes, validation checks, error messages to be displayed etc are. Then do the same for other pages, database creation, data insertion etc. Make sure you get your code well ahead before your viva date & then play around with it. Enter data, delete data, display data, create a new page, create new login or registration page, look at buttons, where is the code for “save” button & how would you know what this button is doing etc.

When they ask “where is the code for this thing” its usually buttons. e.g he asked me where is the code for the categories being updated in DB & I knew it happens when the “Save” button after editing categories is clicked, so I showed him. Similarly you should know your code well. Trust me, they won’t even ask you to make any changes if you satisfy them by this step. However, if they had asked me to make a change, I had my plan B. I would have said, sorry I cannot change “save” to “undo” without MSDN

3. Well prepare the questions which your fellows have posted about the project they have chosen. They usually ask same questions over & over. So if you are like 5th or 6th person taking the viva for that project, you are lucky because you already know 50% of the questions they will ask.

This is all for now. I will update this post if I remember something further. Just stay calm & call batman.