CS 561 - Guidelines for PROGRESS on Course Project

Due Dates and Deliverables:

Progress Report in hardcopy.
This report typically would tend to be 10 pages in length. There is however no required minimum or maximum length.
[ Due: Thursday, March 29th, 2007].
If you wish, you are welcome to make an appointment with the instructor and also show off any partial demo you may have working at this time (or, you can do so at any future time before the final project presentation).

Expectations on Project Progress

The progress report should clearly state the current status of the project.

Note that by this time, I would expect you to have completed a significant portion of your overall project. Your progress must clearly reflect this.

I expect you to have conducted the necessary background work including establishing a bibliography, reading relevant papers, completed setup of the development tools and environment. In addition, I expect that you resolved design issues of your proposed system. Make sure to include literature, manuals, webpages, and so on that you have reviewed for the project.

At this stage, depending on your type of project, I would expect you to already have developed a (very scaled-down) initial version of your prototype --- with some minimalistic subset of the core desired functionality. This would serve primarily as feasiblity assessment for you on your project, and should give you a solid foundation upon which to build up the features you propose to tackle. Make sure to list all tasks you have accomplished thus far.

You would have by now developed a detailed project description to assess which features you proposed to develop as reasonable within the remaining time period of this class. Ideally, there should be no more doubt left about the scope as well as expected outcome of your project. To illustrate that you have control over your project, you need to construct a precise schedule, week by week, on how you plan to make progress and how this progress will lead you to a concrete outcome.

Some Sample Outline of Project Progress Report

• COVER PAGE. You need to have an appropriate title, team members, an abstract, and keywords.
• OVERVIEW. Clear outline the goal of the project you are tackling, and motivate its usefulness (for you in terms of learning skills, or in general for some applications). Also, detail out the concrete projects tasks. This includes a precise characterization of requirements and assumptions you are making.
• BACKGROUND MATERIAL. Specific background material that your work is based on; this would include a description of the DBMS tools your use, such as, architecture, features, etc. and why you have chosen that technology?
• YOUR APPROACH.
  • GENERAL APPROACH you took to address problem /justification
  • DESIGN and its justification : this could for example be some UML diagrams for system design and ER diagram for database design, but it also could be a description in English and maybe some algorithms about the protocols you are trying out.
  • IMPLEMENTATION and system details; detailed software architecture and components in your system.
  • ISSUES: problems you encountered, how you addressed them.
  • VALIDATION OF YOUR APPROACH: have you build the system? how much of it is now running? which part of it is not working? what example queries or cases are you targeting? what experiments and /or sample data sets have you run, or do you plan to run ? how will you know that your system works?
• 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.
• MEMBER CONTRIBUTION: List the tasks and amount of respective effort that each member of the team was involved in.
• 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.
• 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.
• LITERATURE. List all papers, manuals, URLs, systems that you had to study to get up to speed on your project. Cite any ideas you have taken from elsewhere.
• Appendix. As needed for detailed sample data sets, diagrams, detailed background material, etc.

Project Progress Grading

The progress made on the project will be assessed based on the written report as well as a discussion of the instructor with the team. Note that you must demonstrate that (1) you have completed a sufficient amount of work by now, and (2) that there is a clear plan of what will be accomplished by the end of the project, and (3) how you intend to evaluate your proposed project.

The score of this assignment (total possible is 100 pts) will be given using the following as guideline:

• the difficulty and size of the project you have chosen to work on. Have you been creative at scoping out and then defining a reasonably scoped project that is challenging yet doable. What the type of knowledge or tools has to be investigated in the course of the project (have you learned something new?) [30pts].
• the progress made towards your project thus far, what tasks have you completed, how well thought-out are your ideas thus far, how clean is your design and software, etc. (i.e., are you about half-way (2/5th) into the project by now?) [30pts].
• the written project report (is it well organized, complete, informative, professional, properly cites the literature, etc?) [30pts.]
• the time plan for the 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 in order to complete it in time by end of semester ?) [10pts].
• 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.]