CSE 8317: Project Information

CSE 8317: Course Project

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

Project assignment

You project is the most important part of your CSE 8317. It demonstrates your mastery of the course material and application of newly acquired knowledge/skills in solving a practical problem or in conducting individual research on a relevant topic. It will consist of the following parts:

A project proposal: due on 3/3/15.
A project presentation: to be given in one of the last three classes (4/15/15, 4/22/15, 4/29/15).
A final project report: due on 4/21/15.

The details are given below.

Acceptable types of projects

The project will of two generic types:

Application/new-research 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 (new) 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.
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.
Term (self-study) 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 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.
In order to have in-depth discussions/analysis/critique/extensions, try to limit your primary source papers to 5, i.e., I don't want a general (comprehensive) survey paper covering tens or even hundreds of published papers.

Special notes about team project:

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). However, if one chooses to write a term paper, it should be an individual effort.

Project 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.

Project presentation

To be given in one of the last three classes (4/15/15, 4/22/15, 4/29/15).

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. These documents are not counted in the 15-page limit.

Prepared by Jeff Tian (tian@engr.smu.edu).
Posted: Jan. 21, 2015. Last update: Jan. 21, 2015.