CS 542 Course Project
Guidelines for Project Progress Report.
Due Dates and Deliverables:
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Mid-Progress Report:
This report must be typed. Typically
these reports tend to be 10+ pages in length.
There is however no required minimum or maximum length.
-
Due:
This report must be turned in hardcopy at start of class.
Due on November, Thursday 8th, 2012.
Expectations on Project Progress
The goals and scope of project should
be layed out clearly, as well as your plans
for completion of the project, including evaluation
of your ideas and your system.
Most importantly, a clear indication of
all of your accomplishments thus far must be
clearly stated, so that your current status
of the project can be assessed.
By this time, I would expect you to have completed
at least half of your overall project and your
progress must reflect this.
I expect you to have completed all
necessary background work including establishing a bibliography,
reading relevant papers, completed setup of the
development tools and environment, and resolved
any design issues of your proposed system.
Include all material you have reviewed for the project.
At this stage I would expect you
to also already have developed a
(possibly scaled-down) initial version of your prototype
with some subset of the core desired functionality.
You can show me a demo of what you have, if you wish.
Also include some screen dumps
or other means of showing off what you have completed
to date.
You also should have
refined the project plan or possibly re-directed the effort
based on your background studies, if deemed necessary.
There should be no more doubt left about the
scope as well as expected outcome of your project.
You need to present
a precise schedule, by week, on how you plan to make progress.
Some Sample Outline of Project Progress Report
The main highlights of your projects should
be stressed in your report.
-
COVER PAGE. You need to have an appropriate title,
authors, an abstract, and keywords.
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OVERVIEW.
Clear outline of the project you are tackling, and
a description of your project goals.
This includes a precise
characterization of your application requirements, potential user
group targeted, etc.
-
BACKGROUND MATERIAL.
Specific background material
that your work is based on; including
DBMS tools you use, architecture, etc., and why chosen.
-
YOUR APPROACH.
-
GENERAL APPROACH you took to address problem /justification
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DESIGN and its justification : UML diagrams for system
design and ER diagram for database design.
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IMPLEMENTATION and system details;
architecture and tools.
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ISSUES: problems you encountered, how you addressed them.
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VALIDATION OF YOUR APPROACH:
have you build the system? how much of it is now running?
which part of it is not working?
what experiments and /or sample
data sets have you run, or do you plan to run ?
how will you know that your system works?
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LESSONS LEARNED. Describe your
experience what you have learned thus far?
What skills you are practicing or
new tools and techniques you are working with, that
you did not know before?
Describe whether you would do this work again the same way,
or if not, what you would recommend doing differently.
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MEMBER CONTRIBUTION:
List the tasks and amount of respective effort that each
member of the team was involved in.
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CONCLUSIONS: Describe your contributions thus far, and
whether you have achieved what you set out to do.
Also, list what you have NOT managed to accomplish thus far.
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PLAN AND SCHEDULE FOR REMAINDER OF PROJECT:
Give a precise schedule for what next tasks are planned and
also what evaluations you will conduct of your system to assure
it is well tested and working.
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Appendix. As needed for detailed sample data sets, diagrams,
detailed background material, etc.
Project Progress Grading
For the project progress, you can get a maximum of 100 pts.
This will represent 30 % of the overall grade you
will receive for the final course project.
You must demonstrate that
you have completed a sufficient amount of work that amounts
to about 1/2 of the project scope.
You should demonstrate that there is a clear plan of what will be accomplished
by the end of the project, and how you will evaluate your proposed system.
The progress made on the project will be assessed based on
the written report,
interactions with the instructor
concerning your progress and understanding of your project,
and possibly a software demonstration.
The grade of this assignment will be
given using the following as guideline:
-
the difficulty and size of the project you have chosen to work on,
and the type of knowledge or tools to be investigated in the course
of the project (Have you learned something new?) [20pts].
-
the progress made towards your project thus far
(i.e., are you half-way through project?)
[35pts].
-
the written project report
(is it well organized, complete, informative, professional?)
[40pts.]
-
time plan for remainder of the
project (do you now have set up a realistic plan of what
tasks need to be done during the
remaining weeks of the project to complete it in
time by end of semester?)
[5pts].
-
the understanding of each team member of his or her part
of the project, as well as of the overall group product.
[no pts, except this may be used to not assign the same
score to each of the team members. the default is all
get the same score, unless there is some inequality of effort.]