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.
Sometimes, a "mixed" type of application project may also be possible. For example, you may perform some details defect analysis that may support both SRE and SSE related activities, or extension of SRE and/SSE to include not only reliability and/or safety aspects (which should still be the focus in this case) but also other quality/dependability aspects such as usability, availability, fault tolerance, security, etc.
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.
I have included a link in BlackBoard for you to upload your presentation documents if you elect to do so (in other words, the submission of presentation material is optional, but the presentation itself is required).
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.