Deadlines

You are being asked to submit the following documents as intermediate milestones for your project:

1. Functional Specification to be submitted by the end of the third week of the Spring Term.

2. System Design document to be submitted by the end of the fifth week of the Spring Term.

1. The programming must be completed ready for demonstration by the first Wednesday of the Summer Term
2. A written report must be submitted by the second Wednesday of the Summer Term

You should make allowance for all reasonable eventualities - arguments such as "the computers were all in use whenever I looked last week" or "I had the flu for three days and fell behind" are most unlikely to be accepted.

You are strongly advised to assume that the deadline for programming is the end of the Spring Term, so you have some time in hand in case of disaster! The choice, and the risk, is yours. Please don't try to blame someone or something else if your program is not working at the time of the demonstration.

Submissions

All documents submitted should carry:

1. the team identification,
2. the author(s) of the document, and
3. the date written,

Documents can be submitted to the demonstrator/lecturer in charge of your group, or they can be submitted in the assigned coursework pigeonhole for your group.

Assessment

Assessment will be by a demonstration of the programs and by a written report, coupled with an assessment of your group work, problem solving skills and project management over the course of the project. All members of the team should be present at the demonstration. The demonstration is more important than the report, but significant credit will be lost if no report is submitted.

The Team Report should be 10-12 pages long with a rough budget of space as follows:

1. Specification and overview of the system: 2-3 pages
2. Design (architecture-level as well as class-level): 4-5 pages
3. Testing methods: 1-2 pages
4. Teamwork: 1-4 pages
5. The location of your code in the School's file system, together with any instructions required to run it.

6. Appendices.

You should attach as appendices the detailed documentation written during the project, such as the original Functional Specification and the System Design. The Team Diary should also be submitted together with your Team Report.

The Individual Report should contain:

1. The final program specifications of your contribution.
2. Your final program designs in very broad outline only, but mentioning key design decisions.
3. Any further commentary on your contribution to the project, including a brief description of test procedures.
4. Your Individual Diary, together with a summary of the total number of hours you spent in each activity (Specification, Design, Implementation and Integration).

This is likely to be 5-10 pages long plus diary per person.

When writing the report, bear in mind that a common fault of documentation is to dive too quickly into fine detail, without giving an adequate overview. Take as much care in structuring your documentation as you do in structuring your programs. A detailed design description of your programs is not required, but programs should be adequately commented. You will lose credit for any programs that are not minimally commented with the name of the author, the date of completion and a description of the purpose of the program. All important routines should have similar comments together with an outline specification of all arguments required, globals accessed and results returned, and any other information which is important to a programmer using that routine. Use of Javadoc is strongly recommended, but the javadoc should not be included in the report.

The team report, together with individual reports of all members of the team, must be handed in together in a suitable wallet so that all parts are conveniently accessible and clearly labelled.

Assessment breakdown will be approximately as follows:

There will be credit assigned to the effectiveness of the software engineering methods used, project management, timely progress, teamwork and documentation, in addition to the the quality of the system produced and the individual coding efforts.

The team effort part of an individual's mark may be weighted by the individual's contribution and participation. Anyone who fails to give a demonstration, or who fails to submit a report, or who fails to contribute to the team, will be given very few marks overall.

There are no separate marks allocated for the documents submitted for the intermediate milestone, but their quality will be assessed as part of the project management component of the mark.

Important

If the marks for the team are not to be split equally, owing to someone's exceptional effort, or reduced contribution, then all team members must submit a note identifying the altered proportions of marks to be allocated, signed by all team members. This has to be submitted at the same time as the final report, not later. If you have worked harder than your colleagues, you should ensure that you gain the appropriate credit. If you are too shy to negotiate it with them, you will not receive any preferential treatment. It is up to you and the team to be fair to all.

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