Assignment

• A project proposal: due on 3/21/05;
• A project summary or an optional project presentation: due on 5/7/05.
• A final project report: due on 5/17/04.

Acceptable projects and project proposals

1. An application of some specific testing techniques/models to some programs/products you are developing/testing/maintaining/supporting. For example, you may choose to construct control flow and data flow models to test a module you are developing at your work. Another concrete example is the paper by Chruscielski and Tian online. an application of Musa's approach to construct an operational profile for a specific product (LMTAS/CSS).
   Pay special attention to the evaluation of your testing/analysis results. Be prepared to answer this type of questions:
   • How do you know if the testing technique works?
   • What's the basis for comparison (baseline)?
   • What about some other testing techniques that might be appropriate?
   You answer can be based on either the practical evidence (executing several types of testing cases and observing the results) or based on logical arguments (suitability of certain testing technique on certain types of products), or both.
2. Quality analysis and modeling for practical applications. For example, you may collect inspection/testing records for a product at your work, and construct quality models to analyze the results, to assess the effectiveness of your inspection/testing techniques, or to identify high-defect modules for focused quality improvement actions.

• clearly identify the problem that you are going to address,
• brief background information,
• the solution strategy you intend to use (which testing technique? what kind of analyses? etc.),
• expected results,
• analysis of result to be performed,
• followup actions,
• a rough schedule,
• indicate whether you'll be making a project presentation, and, if possible, your preferred presentation date.

Project summary or presentation

You may choose to do a (full) project presentation yourself. In that case, you don't need to submit the project summary nor a full project report (see next section). Each presentation could last anywhere between 10 and 30 minutes. You need to highlight the problem/solution-strategy/results/analysis for us to get the basic picture, but not necessarily too much details.

Project report

• Full report: If you are not doing a project presentation, you must submit a full report. A full report should be treated as a term paper, around 15 double-spaced pages in length, but no longer than 20 pages. It should clearly and comprehensively states the background, problem, strategy, activities, results, result analysis, lessons learned, followup actions, and a high level summary (or an abstract at the beginning). Additional material, such as graphs, models, test cases, etc. produced, information sources and raw data, customer surveys, etc., can be included in the appendix and clearly marked as such. A good example of a full report is the paper by Chruscielski and Tian online.
• Concise report: If you are doing a project presentation, you may submit a concise report instead of a full report (of course you are welcome to submit a full report if you choose to do so). A concise report can be about 10 double-spaced pages, covering the same contents as a full report, but without repeating much of the information presented in the project presentation already. You may also include the project presentation slides/pictures as attachments to the project report.