Mock Customer Interview

Due Jan 30 by 7pm
Points 0
Submitting a file upload
Available after Jan 28 at 12am

In this new and experimental exercise, you'll get a chance to practice your interview skills by interviewing an AI that has been "aligned" (conditioned) to act as a potential customer for a typical CS169L-like project.

You'll work in small groups to conduct an interview that shouldn't take more than 30-40 minutes, then produce either a basic UML class diagram or entity-relationship diagram (your team's choice) summarizing your high-level proposed design for the customer's app. You can just turn in a snapshot of a hand drawn diagram, one per team. Grading is based on effort/completion, not correctness of the diagram. Really, we just want you to try the exercise, and give us feedback about how it went with a questionnaire at the end. Your answers will only be used to improve the tool and the exercise.

Background:

Ethan Thompson, an operations manager, aims to create an online ticket platform to improve engagement and streamline operations for his set of theaters in San Francisco. The platform, called "Tickets", should be a tool for customers to purchase tickets to attend shows in theaters. You have been hired to gather the requirements for this platform by interviewing Mr. Thompson. Note that Mr. Thompson has no technical or software engineering background, so they will be unable to validate your technical decisions, answer technical questions, or engage in conversation in technical terms.

What you'll do:

In groups of ideally 3 students per group (2 is OK if the numbers don't work out), each group will share a single computer to chat with your synthetic customer at this link: https://leia-workbench-0c37c4cd1c94.herokuapp.com/ Links to an external site.

Enter code XM6G7XM5V83DVWXE6 as the Experiment code. Your TA will give you a unique (per team) Student code when you start the exercise.

Conducting the interview happens via a chat interface. Please observe the following guidelines:

Start by introducing yourselves by name as members of a software engineering team. Then, when asking questions, since it's a chat interface, please identify yourself when a new person takes over the conversation: "Thank you. Armando now asks..." or "Michael would like clarification on your previous answer...", etc.
Please don't try to "game" the interview using prompt injection, etc. But on the followup questionnaire, please do report any unusual/inappropriate or "misbehaviors" on the LLM's part (including engaging in technical discussion!).
Please behave as if you're in a live meeting in which the customer can see and hear everything you do. Don't have "side conversations" with your teammates between interactions with the customer—just as if you were in a live meeting.

After the interview:

Still working together, produce a UML class diagram or entity-relationship diagram (on which a schema would be based, for example)—either one is fine, and a hand-drawn diagram is fine. Any one of your teammates can submit the diagram in bCourses, but please write the names of everyone in your team on the diagram, so we can verify that everyone completed the exercise.
Each person individually should complete this short survey Links to an external site. about the assignment.