CSE 8317: Course Project
Project assignment
You project is a major part of your CSE 8317. It will
consist of the following parts:
-
A pre-proposal (or preliminary ideas):
to be discussed in class on 8/23/08.
-
A project proposal:
due on 9/6/08, with in-class discussion and feedback.
-
A project presentation:
on 10/4/08 (or 9/20/08, if you can make it).
-
A final project report:
due on 10/8/08.
The details are given below.
Acceptable types of projects
The project will of two possible types:
-
Application project:
An application of a specific technique
in software reliability engineering or software safety engineering
discussed in class and a report of the experience and related findings.
For example,
you may collect testing data from one of your company's project,
fit various reliability models to assess the product reliability,
test effectiveness, and identify problematic areas for focused
reliability/quality/productivity improvement.
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
via various safety assurance techniques applied to pre-release
software development or post-release in-field support.
-
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 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.
Another example is safety assurance techniques for a specific industry,
such as one of aeronautics, health care, space, energy industries.
Students may form a team to do a application-type project if it is of
a larger scale/scope that requires team effort.
However, if one chooses to write a term paper,
it should be an individual effort.
Project Proposal (and Pre-Proposal)
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
- 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.
In case of a group project (application project only, not term paper),
please also provide information regarding roles and responsibilities.
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
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 reports),
you need to include a copy of the paper(s) with your report.
Prepared by Jeff Tian
(tian@engr.smu.edu).
Posted: Aug. 8, 2008.