Project assignment

• A pre-proposal (or preliminary ideas): to be discussed in class on 3/19/11 for SW7 students, and in class or via e-mail/blackboard before proposal due date for other students.
• A project proposal:
  • SW7: due on 4/16/11, with in-class discussion and feedback.
  • Other sections: due on 3/11/11.
    New due date for compus/distance students: 3/22/11.
• A project presentation: on 5/14/11 for SW7 students and the last three classes (FCFS queue) for the rest.
• A final project report: due on 5/17/11 for SW7 students and 4/27/11 for the rest.

Acceptable types of projects

• 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, reliability change/growth, test effectiveness, and identify problematic areas for focused reliability/quality/productivity improvement. Another example is a comprehensive analysis (FTA, ETA, FMEA, etc.) of some (potential) safety problems in the embedded system 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 (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 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.
  (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.