Types of Assignment

The reports and presentations are group assignments corresponding to major project milestones. The first assignment is a report. The other three assignments consist of both a presentation and a report or other documentation.

With each assignment there is a survey to be completed individually. See the Surveys page for more information. It is important that everybody completes each survey and submits it on time. The course team uses the surveys to monitor the progress of the projects and to understand the contributions made by each member of the team.

Reports

All members of the project team should share in the production of the reports. When you have completed a report, (a) deliver it to the client, (b) send it by email to the Instructor and Teaching Assistant, (b) enter it into GitHub or another software project system, for future reference.

In writing each report, pay particular attention to the following:

• The report must be understandable by the client.
• The requirements must be the client's, not your own concepts, and must be specified in sufficient detail to test against the implementation.
• Design concepts must be clearly separated from requirements.
• The design should include both system and program design.
• Requirements may be partitioned into those that must be met by the first release and those that are optional.

The reports for Milestones 2 and 3 should include:

• Review of progress since the previous milestone.
• Revised schedule and plan for the remainder of the project.
• Preliminary versions of the documentation for those parts of the project that have been worked up to the current milestone.

Here are some examples of reports from earlier classes. They are very different in style, but each provides a good example of an effective report. They are placed here with the permission of the student teams.

• Sample report 1
• Sample report 2

Presentations

During the semester each team will give three presentations with associated reports on the work completed. You will make a one hour presentation to the client, the Instructor and the Teaching Assistant. Everybody is expected to be a presenter at least once.

You should sign up for presentation time slots as early as possible. See the Presentation Times page for available times and instructions on how to reserve time slots for your presentations.

The room will be provided with a computer projector and Internet connection.

See Lecture 24, Presentations for advice on how to prepare for your presentations. Before the first presentation, there will be a discussion in class of the goals of the presentations and how to prepare for them.

Assignment 1 to 4

More details about the four major assignments and the handover to the client are on the web page Assignments 1 to 4.