CSE 8314: Course Project
Project assignment
You project is the most important part of your CSE 8314 class.
It demonstrates your mastery of the overall course material.
It will consist of the following parts:
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A project proposal:
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Due on 10/1/19 for campus students
and 10/3/19 for distance students.
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A project presentation:
in the last 4 classes (FCFS queue).
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A final project report:
12/3/19 for campus students,
and 12/5/19 for distance students.
The details are given below.
Acceptable types of projects
The project will be of two generic types:
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Application project:
An application of a specific set of
software metrics and/or quality engineering techniques
discussed in class and a report of the activities,
experience and related findings.
For example,
you may define/select/collect metrics data from
one of your company's projects, perform various analyses,
and identify problematic areas for focused
quality/productivity improvement.
It is a good idea to consider multiple metrics,
preferably from different metrics categories.
For example, some internal, some external metrics.
When you measure quality, multiple quality attributes/characteristics
are preferable 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.
-
Replication and variation project:
Similar to the above, but maybe based on other people's data.
In this case, you might want to replicate the previous (most
likely published) study similar to what we have above.
In replication,
you need to have enough variations, which can be achieved in
various ways, e.g.,
-
Additional metrics can be collected from or calculated from the raw data.
-
Different models might be used.
-
Combined data and models based on multiple project might be possible.
-
Hypothesis testing or other empirical analysis can be performed based
on cumulative data from multiple previous work.
In this way, it becomes a "mega" study of the original works
Students may form a team to do a application-type project if it is of
a larger scale/scope that requires team effort
(must be well justified).
Project Proposal (and Pre-Proposal)
You project proposal should be around 3-5 double spaced pages
in length, and should include the following information:
- a proper title (not just project for CSE 8314)
- an proper abstract, that should be written as an executive summary
- clearly identify the problem that you are going to address
- some basic background information,
- the solution strategy you intend to use
(what are you going to measure? how? which analysis/modeling technique? etc.)
- a rough schedule
- for application-type projects, you also need to discuss:
- measurement implementation and data collection,
- analysis of result to be performed,
- followup actions,
In case of a group project,
please also provide information regarding roles and responsibilities.
Project presentation
Each presentation will be between 15 and 30 minutes.
Please focus more on the important activities and findings,
not too much on the background and details.
Project report
A project report should be
around 15 double-spaced pages in length,
and clearly and comprehensively describes the background,
problem, strategy, metrics, activities, result analysis,
lessons learned, followup actions, and summary/conclusions.
A high level summary or an abstract should also be included
at the beginning of your report.
If you'd like to,
raw data and detailed modeling/analysis activities
should be included in the appendix.
Remember, it is a "report" after all.
Not a collection of data and models without description/discussion.
Prepared by Jeff Tian
(tian@engr.smu.edu).
Posted: Aug. 28, 2019.
Last update: Sept. 18, 2019.