Project assignment

• A pre-proposal (or preliminary ideas): to be discussed in class on 8/31/13 for SW7 students, and in class or via e-mail/blackboard before proposal due date for other students.
• A project proposal:
  • SW7: due on 9/15/13, with in-class discussion and feedback on 9/14/13.
  • Other sections: due on 9/30/13 for campus students and 10/2/13 for distance students.
• A project presentation: on 10/12/13 for SW7 students and the last three classes (FCFS queue) for the rest.
• A final project report: due on 10/15/13 for SW7 students; 12/2/13 for campus students section 701c; and 12/4/13 for distance students.

Acceptable types of projects

• Application project: An application of a specific technique in software metric and/or quality engineering discussed in class and a report of the experience and related findings. For example, you may define/select/collect metrics data from one of your company's project, and perform various quality/productivity/etc. analysis, and identify problematic areas for focused quality/productivity improvement.
  It is a good idea to consider multiple metrics, preferrably from different metrics categories. For example, some internal, some external metrics. When you measure quality, multiple quality attributes/characteristics are preferrable to a single one. For this reason, and for a good learning experience, a pure SRE (software reliability engineering) project is not suitable for this class, although it might be perfectly OK for CSE 8317 Software Reliability and Safety, which covers a subset of the quality metrics we cover in this class, together with other material not covered here and in more depth.
• Term research paper: A term paper covering some in-depth (theoretical or fundamental research) study of a chosen topic. If you choose this option, you must study at least three papers (no survey papers as your sources, please!) of a closely related topic thoroughly, and your conclusions and observations must be your own based on your own experience, specifically conducted cases studies, and/or logical reasoning. The summary of the chosen papers is only a small part of your term paper, the focus should be on issues mentioned above. One concrete example is a study of hypothesis testing using metrics data. Another example is metrics usage and modeling for cloud computing as a new application area.
  (For those of you who are familiar with technical publications, your term research paper is similar to some "survey papers" you see from time to time in journals. --- You see, your are producing a survey paper here. That's why I don't want you to use survey papers as your primary sources.)

Project Proposal (and Pre-Proposal)

• clearly identify the problem that you are going to address, or topic area for your term paper,
• some basic background information,
• the solution strategy you intend to use (which implementation approach? which analysis/modeling technique? etc.), or some candidate papers or sources
• a rough schedule
• for application-type projects, you also need to discuss:
  • expected results,
  • analysis of result to be performed,
  • followup actions,
• for term papers, you also need to pay attention to:
  • importance and relevance of the selected topic and its relation to the specific topic(s) we discussed in class.
  • importance and contribution of candidate papers
  • diversity of candidate papers, all or most should be from diverse published sources (see my comments about hw#1).
  • if you have access to relevant internal reports, they will probably be more relevant, but you should tie them to the "state-of-art" published research.

The pre-proposal needs not to be written down. It's just preliminary ideas about the project topic, so that we can discuss it and I can give you some early feedback.

Project presentation

Project report

For term papers, please also include, in the appendix, the titles and abstracts of the papers your covered in detail. In additional, if the paper(s) was not publicly available (e.g., internal reports), you need to include a copy of the paper(s) with your report. These documents are not counted in the 15-page limit.