Software Engineering Project Report

General Note: The information provided here is an adaptation from the project guidelines provided by Dr. Ivan Marsic for his Software Engineering course

Report #3: SPECIFICATION & DESIGN -- Iteration 2 (Revised and Collated)  

1.   Report Format

This report collates Reports #1 & #2 into a single document. This report should be self-contained and contain all the information that is relevant to your project. It should be possible to discard all previous reports and read this one alone to obtain all the relevant information about the project. The report should reflect the revisions and additions since the previous reports were submitted.

The report format should follow the formats of the previous two reports.

• Cover Page and Individual Contributions Breakdown, as specified here.
• Table of Contents
  Ensure that the page numbers listed here are correct
• Summary of Changes
  Provide an itemized list of key revisions since the previous two reports. This includes key changes in project objectives, use case descriptions, and system design (e.g., interaction diagrams, class and package diagrams).

The report must contain the following sections:

1. Customer Problem Statement of Requirements (as in Report #1, revised as needed)
2. Glossary of Terms (as in Report #1, revised as needed)
3. System Requirements and Analysis (as in Report #1, revised as needed)
4. Functional Requirements Specification and Use Cases (as in Report #1, revised as needed)
   Elaborate only the use cases that will be implemented by the time of the final demo. For the use cases that will not be implemented for the final demo, provide a casual description for each and indicate that these could be considered for future work.
   System Sequence Diagrams should be updated to incorporate the use cases that will be completed for the final demo.
   This section must include the Traceability Matrix that shows how your use cases are related to your system requirements.
5. Effort Estimation using Use Case Points
   When calculating duration (equation 4.8 in the lecture notes), assume the productivity factor PF = 28 hours per use case point.   Show the process, not only the final number.
6. System Architecture and System Design (as in Report #1, revised as needed)
7. Domain Modeling Analysis (as in Report #2, revised to incorporate the use cases that will be completed for the final demo)
   This section must include the Traceability Matrix that shows how your use cases map to your domain concepts. Include text description, not only a table with checkmarks.
8. Interaction Diagrams (as in Report #2, revised as needed)
   • IMPORTANT: Your revised interaction diagrams must include some of the Design Patterns that were covered in the lectures after the Report #2 was submitted.
     Explain and justify the patterns that you use in your new design. State explicitly in what sense the use of the specific design pattern in the particular interaction diagrams improves the design.
9. Class Diagram and Interface Specification (as in Report #2, revised as needed)
   This section must include the Traceability Matrix that shows how your classes are related to your domain concepts and a text description of the concepts-to-classes evolution.
   In addition, include the following subsections:
   3. Design Patterns
      As for Interaction Diagrams indicate and discuss the use of design patterns to improve your design.
   4. Object Constraint Language (OCL) Contracts
      List important contracts (invariants, preconditions, postconditions) for classes and their operations (See Bruegge & Dutoit, Chapter 9; and Miles & Hamilton, Appendix A)
10. Algorithms and Data Structures (as in Report #2, revised as needed)
11. User Interface Design and Implementation (as in Report #1 and Report #2, revised to incorporate the use cases that will be completed for the final demo)
12. Test Designs (as in Report #2, revised as needed)
13. History of Work, Current Status, and Future Work
    Instead of the section Plan of Work have the section History of Work which documents how the actual milestones and deadlines evolved. Compare these against the milestones as planned in Reports #1 and #2.
    Also summarize (as a bulleted list) your key accomplishments in this project.
    Discuss the possible directions for future work on this project.
14. References (books, papers, URL's of the sources of information and tools used in the project)

NOTE: Do not submit separately “revised/corrected” versions of Reports #1 and #2. All corrections suggested for those reports should be incorporated in Report #3.
If in doubt of whether to include something from Reports #1 and #2 since it may be overlapping, then include everything that is not repetitious.

Discuss your diagrams! Describe all design decisions and other things that are not obvious from the diagrams. Any useful information is welcome. There is no limit on the number of pages for the report. Having good comments and explanations greatly helps in reading and evaluating the project and will certainly contribute to your grade.
Also, give exact references and URLs of any material that is used in the project and doesn't originate from the textbook.

Since this report is a compilation and revision of the previous two, it is a good idea to address all the issues that were not adequately addressed in the first two reports. Discuss with the Instructor what could have been done better in the first two reports and also take into account the comments that were provided to you earlier. Do not repeat the same mistakes.

1.1   Report #3 Should Show Project Evolution, Not Only the Final Product

We are interested in the evolution of your project as well as in the final outcome. If you began with certain ideas but now have modified them, you should not simply discard for the third report. First explain how you started, then explain why you moved on to a new design. Why the original design was inadequate? How is the new design better? If you scaled down your initial ambitions, indicate that this can be part of future work for your project. Polish only the ideas that you have implemented for final submission.

Include both the domain model and the class diagram in the report. You should know by now that your domain model does not need to exactly correspond to the class diagram. In fact, it is very likely that they will be different, with class diagram having many more classes. Moreover, if they do match exactly, that is likely a sign of a bad design.
On the other hand, there should be significant correlation between the two, since otherwise would imply that the domain model was not used in the design (hence, it is completely useless).
The key difference between the domain model and class diagram is that the domain model shows conceptual organization of your software, while the class diagram contains many implementation details. Therefore, the domain model being more abstract and summarized should be easier to understand. The class diagram contains many details and requires longer examination to understand. It may contain many specific details of your particular implementation of the conceptual domain model.
Both have value and both should be included.

Ideally, you would show the first Domain Model that was part of Report #1, then you show the most recent Domain Model that you derived at the end of the semester. Same for the Class Diagram, first the one from Report #2, then the final one.
Provide description how new domain model evolved from the old one, and how the class diagram evolved from the domain model.

• Describe the technical challenges you encountered in the development of your software product. What topics do you feel should be covered in a pre-requisite course for this course?
• Describe how the software engineering techniques you learned in this course helped you to address those challenges
• Which techniques were the most useful to your group and why?
• Which techniques were the least useful to your group and why?
• Based on your experience, do you think is it better to work on an already defined project (not necessarily continuing the work of a past group), or to define your own new project? Explain your answer.
• What challenges you individually experienced by working on a software project as part of a team?
• What benefits you individually experienced by working on a software project as part of a team?
• Describe what other knowledge you feel might have helped you with the project development
• Overall, how did the course meet your needs or fall short? Discuss topics covered that helped or did not help in advancing your knowledge of software development.

2.   Effort Breakdown

There is usually some confusion about reporting the contribution breakdown for this report. Keep in mind that this report is mainly made by combining Reports #1 and #2 (although there are some new elements unique to this report).
Recall the policy that the contributions should be claimed by all team members who made any intellectual contribution to a particular part of the report. Therefore, the breakdown should reflect the entire history of contributions that eventually led to the writeup of this report.
In other words, the credit must not be claimed solely by the person who did cut-and-paste from the previous two reports!

3.   Grading

See also the grading policy for the assigning the overall team grade vs. grades for the individual members.

First, all reports will be graded independently of each other, as follows:

Note that the grading focus will be on traceability along the domain, class, interaction, etc., diagrams as well as the program code. To avoid confusion, it is extremely important that the names of concepts, classes, methods, and attributes are consistent across all diagrams.

Second, all reports will be cross-compared and rank-ordered. See Report #1 for explanation of this second step.

The reflective essays will be graded individually as part of an overall project report submission.

4.   Report Submission

This report should be sumbitted in whole - as a single full (and final) report.

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