CSE 7314/5314: Project

CSE 7314/5314 (Spring 2008): Course Project

Prof. Jeff Tian (tian@engr.smu.edu)

Assignment

Your project is a major part of your CSE 7314/5314. It will consist of the following parts:

A project proposal: with informal project ideas presented orally in class on 4/5/08 and a formal written proposal due on 4/23/08 (new due date).
A project presentation (two variations: a short summary or a formal presentation, -- details below) on 5/17/08.
A final project report: due on 5/21/08.

The details are given below.

Acceptable project types

There are two types of basic choices for your course project, one focusing on testing, and anther focusing on other QA techniques:

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 example is the development, validation, and usage of an operational profile for a large software systems you are working on.
It's generally a good idea to consider multiple testing techniques and actually use a couple of them in your project to get a hands-on feeling of how different techniques and models work in practical applications.
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?
Your 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. You are expected to study relevant material from Part IV of our textbook (to be covered after final exam) to prepare your for the analyses above.
You may choose to focus on performing various other quality assurance activities and document the results, while performing limited/small-scale testing. Possibilities include comprehensive inspection, defect prevention and process improvement, formal verification, and fault tolerance. You may also collect inspection/testing/QA records for a product at your work, and construct quality models to analyze the results, to assess the effectiveness of your inspection/testing/QA techniques, or to identify high-defect modules for focused quality improvement actions.
If you choose this second type of project, I still want you to perform at least some small scale/amount of testing because it is such an important part of our course. For the QA part, make sure you are focusing on quality that can be quantified and analyzed. (For example, a process definition/improvement initiative with only a logical argument for its superiority is not suitable for this class.)

Where to find something to test or to perform QA on?

Well, I mentioned about your work, a product, or a sub-part of a product, that you are involved at your work. However, if you don't feel comfortable taking this as your class project or talking about it (without mentioning product name and raw data) in class, you need to find something else to work on.
Notice: Your project report must contain testing related technical information, such as test models, test cases, and test results, although you don't have to give detailed product information. As a rule of thumb, if you feel uncomfortable with the material you you have to put into this report, find something else to work on.
Many students used their past projects from work, from their former college/graduate school classes, from their hobby (e.g., game programming), or from their role as users of some specific packages/software/web-site/etc. Apply the same sensitivity rule as for your current project above.
You can get it from someone else. Open source software and programs are a wonderful source for many student projects in the past as well.

Project proposals

You should start early to think about what project you'd like to do for our class, probably starting with our first class. For our class on 4/5/08, please be prepared to talk briefly about your chosen topic, for about 2-5 minutes. Your project proposal should be around 3-4 double spaced pages in length, and should include the following information:

a one-paragraph abstract (at the beginning of the proposal),
introduction: clearly identify the problem that you are going to address,
brief background information (about 1/2 or 1 page),
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 full project presentation or a brief summary.

In case of a group project, please also provide information regarding roles and responsibilities. The amount of work proposed for a group project should be appropriate for the group size. As a general rule of thumb, if something can be comfortably done by a single student, it is not suitable as a group project.

Please keep in mind that by the time you submit your project proposal, we have only covered less than half of the class material, although an overview of the whole course was given at the beginning of the semester. Therefore, you may make certain modifications to the things you propose, but the basic framework should be there in your proposal.

Once I have reviewed your proposal and provided my feedback orally, written or via e-mail, you need to address the issues I raised in your final project report. However, in most of the cases, you do NOT need to submit a revised proposal. In the rare case that your proposal is marked "U" for "unacceptable", you need to communicate with me via e-mails/meetings to make it acceptable, and you may be required to resubmit a revised proposal for this case.

Project presentation: Brief summary or full Presentation? The choice is yours

The minimal requirements for your project presentation on 5/17/08 a brief project summary, in presentation slide format (2-5 slides), suitable for brief in-class presentation/discussion. You summary should focus on the main results from your project for us to get the basic picture. Here is a template for your project summary. You might want to use it as a guide to prepare your summary.

You may choose to do a full project presentation. In that case, you don't need to prepare a project summary. Each presentation should last about 15 minutes. You need to highlight the problem/solution-strategy/results/analysis for us to get the basic picture, but not necessarily all the details, which would require much more than 15 minutes. One common mistake in the past is too much background information but not enough testing/QA-specific technical information. Also, avoid detailed description of the test cases and activities performed.

Project report

The project 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 (and 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 (so it will not be counted towards your 20 page quota).

A couple of common mistakes to avoid:

It is supposed to be a "report", not a set of "presentation slides". So, limit your use of lists/bullets, and put most of the material/discussions in paragraphs.
Your project report must contain testing related technical information, such as important test models, test cases, test results, and analysis of the results. In addition, you need to describe/discuss this information unless it is clearly self-explanatory.
On the other hand, you shouldn't include all the graphs, models, test cases, etc. produced for the project in the report text itself. As I mentioned above, they can be included in the appendix, if you desire, together with other material, such as raw data, customer surveys, etc.

Prepared by Jeff Tian (tian@engr.smu.edu).
Initially posted: March 28, 2008. Last update: April 16, 2008.