CSE 8340: Project Information

CSE 8340: Course Project

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

Assignment

You project is a major part of your CSE 8340. It will consist of the following parts:

A project proposal: due on 3/3/14 for in-class students, and 3/5/14 for distance students.
A project presentation: to be scheduled in the last 3 classes. See the presentation schedule.
A final project report: due on 4/21/14 for in-class students, and 4/23/14 for distance students.

The details are given below.

Acceptable projects and project proposals

The project will either be

An application of a specific technique in empirical software engineering (ESE) discussed in class and the report of related findings. For example, you may collect defect and metrics data from one of your company's project, fit various defect models to identify high risk areas for focused quality improvement; or test various hypotheses related to defect relation to complexity, effort, etc.; or come up with innovative ways to collect/extract/mine data for ESE study from some previously untapped sources, or new data contents, or with automated supported you implemented.
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. One concrete example is an analysis of various risk identification techniques in relation to your company's software development environment.

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

To be scheduled in the last 3 or 4 classes.

Project report

A project report or term paper should be around 15 double-spaced pages in length, and clearly and comprehensively states the background, problem, strategy, activities, results, result analysis, lessons learned, followup actions, and a high level summary.

For term papers, please also include the titles and abstracts of the papers your covered in detail. In additional, if some of the papers were not publicly available (e.g., internal report), you need to include a copy of the paper(s) with your report. However, the majority of the papers should be published ones in periodicals/proceedings.