How to Organize your Senior Project Report
Professor M. L. Liu (October 16, 2008)
General Guidelines
A senior project report is a formal document: you should therefore avoid using colloquial language. A senior project report is also a technical report, you should therefore avoid extensive use of the first-person pronoun I, and generally the narrative should be written in present tense. The report’s target audience should be your peers. Thus, you should write your report so that it is understandable to a student with similar background.
A Generic Report Skeleton
1. Project abstract
This is a one-page summary of what the project is all about. Briefly summarize the question or problem that you are trying to solve, some of the reasons why it is a worthwhile question, and perhaps give an overview of your main results.
2. Background Information
A brief section giving background information which may contain the following information:
why you are interested in the topic/problem of your choice an overview of the issues that will allow your reader to understand the rest of your report. For example, if you are building a web application, then you may want to explain the technical details behind a web application: the system architecture, the software architecture, the available technologies and tools, etc.
3. Problem Statement
Explain in full the problem that you are trying to solve. For example, if you are building a web application, then describe the application at a high level.
4. Requirements
Specify the requirements, including those in each of the following areas:
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Functionalities (end-user, administrative, others) Data requirements (what kind of information needs to be managed? ) User interface (what type of interface is required?) System requirements (platforms, language, tools) Other requirements (security, performance, fault-tolerance, etc.)
You should provide some discussion to justify your choice of requirements. For example, if scalability is not a requirement then you should explain that your application is not expected to have a large number of concurrent users. Do not include design or implementation details at this point. Each requirement should be testable.
5. Description of How You Solved the Problem or Answered the Question
Describe how your work addresses the requirements specified in the previous section. There should be at least three sections: Design: Using a combination of narrative and diagrams, describe the architecture of your application. You may also present class diagrams, user interface layouts, and database schema. If a database is used, then a schema of the database should be presented. You should explain how your designs satisfy the requirements, and, where applicable, provide justifications for your design choices. Implementation: Describe how the implementation was carried out. If special tools were used, explain how the tools were helpful. Present portions of your code to explain the key parts of your implementation. For example, you may present the code for a controller servlet, followed by a paragraph that explains the code. It is recommended that you refer to the code by line number. For example: The code in line 7-9 creates a query to obtain the user’s address from the database. (This implies that your code presentation should be line-numbered) You should provide justifications for your implementation choices (for example, why did you choose to use mySQL for your database, or Java for your programming language.) Testing: Describe how you tested your application – the test plan; tools employed, the test outcomes, etc. Your test plan should address each requirement specified in the last section.
6. Conclusions
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Summarize the problem that you were trying to solve and how you solved it. Explain what you have learned from the experience. Future extension: what can be done to further enhance your work.
7. References
Provide a list of sources of information that you made use of in your work – you may include books, articles, and web sites. It is recommended that you use the IEEE citation style (see http://wwwlib.murdoch.edu.au/find/citation/ieee.html#World Wide Web Documents), as follows: REFERENCES 1. M. N. DeMers, Fundamentals of Geographic Information Systems, 3rd ed. New York : John Wiley, 2005. 2. T. J. van Weert and R. K. Munro, Eds., Informatics and the Digital Society: Social, ethical and cognitive issues: IFIP TC3/WG3.1&3.2 Open Conference on Social, Ethical and Cognitive Issues of Informatics and ICT, July 22-26, 2002, Dortmund, Germany. Boston: Kluwer Academic, 2003. 3. European Telecommunications Standards Institute, "Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB): Implementation guidelines for DVB terrestrial services; transmission aspects," European Telecommunications Standards Institute, ETSI TR-101-190, 1997. [Online]. Available: http://www.etsi.org. [Accessed: Aug. 17, 1998]. Please note that reference number 3 above is a web site. Reputable web sites are acceptable as references, but must be clearly documented as shown in the example. All references given must be referred to in the main body of the report, like this: However, more recent work shows that incorporating performance into framework design is important [2, 3, 4]. In the realm of design patterns, Recoverable Distributor and other distributed design patterns [17] where 2, 3, 4, and 17 are numbers of the references as they appear in the list of references.
8. Appendices
Include program listings, tables of data, etc., that are too lengthy to present in the main body of your report. You should mention in the main body of your report that such information can be found in the appendix. Program listings should be well documented and well formatted.
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Use of diagrams to illustrate your narrative is strongly encouraged. Each diagram should be numbered and captioned (e.g., “Figure 5. System architecture of the E-SeniorProj system”) and should be referenced in the appropriate paragraph ( e.g., “see Figure 5”.) 9. CD Please copy to a CD all electronic files accumulated for your project. Included on the CD should be your report file, your source code and other supporting documents.
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