CSE 8317: Project Information

CSE 8317: Course Project

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

Assignment

You project is a major part of your CSE 8317. It will consist of the following parts:

A project proposal: due on 2/19/03 for in-class and TAGER students, and 3/5/03 for video students.
An optional project presentation: to be scheduled in the last 3 classes.
(See presentation information.)
A final project report: due on 4/16/03 for in-class and TAGER students, and 4/30/03 for video students.

The details are given below.

Acceptable projects and project proposals

The project will either be

An application of a specific technique in software reliability engineering or software safety engineering discussed in class and the report of related findings. For example, you may collect testing data from one of your company's project, fit various reliability model to assess the product reliability, test effectiveness, and identify problematic areas for focused reliability improvement initiatives. Another example is a comprehensive analysis of some (potential) safety problems in the embedded system (such as safety features in automobiles) you are working on, and a plan to address those problems.
A term paper covering some in-depth (theoretical) study of a chosen topic. If you choose this option, you must study at least three papers 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 techniques for early reliability assessment techniques based on information other than observed system failures.

Students may form teams to do the project. However, if one chooses to write a term paper, it should be an individual effort.

You project proposal should be around 3-5 double spaced pages in length, and should include the following information:

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
expected results,
analysis of result to be performed,
followup actions,
a rough schedule

In case of a group project (application project only, not term paper), please also provide information regarding roles and responsibilities.

Project presentation

See presentation information and schedule.

Project report

A project report or term paper should be around 15 double-spaced pages in length, and clearly and comprehensively describes the background, problem, strategy, activities, results, 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.

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 report), you need to include a copy of the paper(s) with your report.