CSIT Final Year project

Introduction

Students who takes degree of Computer Science and Information Technology, need to carry out project in final year(7th Semester). The project is supervised by a member of faculty, and assessed via written reports and presentations.
Selection of Project.
For the preparation of your final year project, you need to have following two
• Finding the topic for project
• Choosing the supervisor
.
Selecting a suitable project topic is quite difficult at first stage. We strongly encourage you to formulate your own ideas for a project
The second task is certainly the easier of the two; see below for information about what support to expect from a supervisor
Your Project Supervisor
Your project supervisor is a member of faculty to whom you can turn for strategic advice and guidance. The expectation is that your supervisor will meet with you every other week to discuss your progress throughout the year. Initially, they will be an invaluable means of assessing whether your project ideas are suitable, and can help you improve them where needed. Another crucial role that supervisors fulfil is to read and comment on draft copies of the reports you intend to submit. Given that your supervisor also examines these reports, it is in your interests to take advantage of this.
Normally, your supervisor will lecture in the area you have selected for your project. However, because there is a limit on how many projects each member of faculty is expected to supervise, there is no guarantee that you will get the supervisor of your choice. Do not be disheartened if this happens. All supervisors are capable of offering you good strategic advice on your report, no matter what the topic.
The way in which supervision times are allocated will vary depending on your supervisor. Supervisors are instructed to allow for meetings of approximately 30 minutes a fortnight for each student. Meetings can be organized by email. Email is the primary means for supervisors to contact supervisees so it is important that you check your email regularly.
It is not possible to produce a successful project based solely on a period of intense activity immediately before the final deadline, as you may be tempted (ill-advisedly) to do for other modules. You should work consistently and effectively throughout the duration of the project. It is often worthwhile writing drafts of the final report while carrying out the work — it is easier to write up the system design just after you have finished it than to write about it months later.
To keep within the deadlines you will have to make regular progress and remember where your time has gone. To help you to do this you should record your activity in a weekly log. The log is a weekly record of work you have engaged in to meet your objectives. You should start the log straight away and include records of meetings with your supervisor. You should meet with your supervisor regularly taking your log along to review progress. The complete log can form part of an appendix to your final report.

Project timescale

You should submit a number of written documents throughout the project. The deadlines for these and timings of other project activities are listed below:
• Register with supervisor on projects database
• Accepted by supervisor on projects database
• Project proposal: (submitted to supervisor).
• Interim report (two copies submitted to the college).
• Application for ethical review (if required
• Draft report
• Final report (two copies submitted to college).
• Project presentation short talk.

Please note that two copies of the interim report and final report are required. You will be formally assessed on the interim report, the final report and short talk.  Below are detailed descriptions of each of the documents and assessments:
Project proposal
At the start of your project you will be expected to read any relevant background references and to prepare a short (approximately two A4 sheets) note describing the objectives of your project and how you plan to meet those objectives. The proposal should provide the following information:

• Your name
• Your supervisor’s name
• Working title — the working title should be a good indication of what your project is about. The working title will be used in choosing examiners for your project. You can change the title for your final report. If you change the topic, you should change the working title to reflect this and inform the project coordinator of the change. You should only change the topic by agreement with your supervisor.
• Aims and objectives — aims describe purpose and intention and include a description of your motivations for undertaking this particular topic. Objectives relate to the expected outcomes of the project. You should break these down into ‘primary objectives’ which you guarantee to achieve and ‘extensions’ which will only be implemented if time allows. The primary objectives should be clearly specified, but the extensions may be vaguer. Do not be afraid to specify more extensions than you will be able to implement.
• Relevance — write a short paragraph to explain how this project relates to your degree course.
• Resources required — it is your responsibility to make sure that the resources you need are available. Do not expect the department to buy things you need. (If you are going to use something not normally supported by the department you will need to obtain approval from your supervisor.)
• Copy of your personal weekly timetable indicating lectures, tutorials and periods of the week you intend to devote to your project.
• Detailed bibliography of background reading.
• List of other students doing related projects (if applicable).
• Interim log, indicating meetings with supervisor and material consulted so far.
This proposal is not formally assessed and should be submitted directly to your supervisor.

Interim report

By the end of Week , you are required to submit an interim report on your project. This report is formally assessed and two identical copies must be submitted to the College Office. Interim reports are usually 3000-5000 words in length. But the word count would depend on a number of factors including the number of diagrams, amount of detailed design work required, etc, so please check with your supervisor what would be appropriate in your case. The report is effectively an expansion of the project proposal and should include:
• Introduction — This is to provide you with a sense of direction. It specifies the objectives of the project and the needs of your intended users that are achievable in terms of time available and your experience. It should introduce both the problem area (remember your reader may not know anything about the particular problem you have chosen) and give an overview of the rest of the report.
• Requirements analysis — Your aim is to design a system that will meet the needs of or be directed towards some target group of users. This section will describe the needs of those users, to what extent they are met by existing solutions and how an ideal system might meet them more exactly. In this section, you should feel free to describe the solutions that you do not expect to have time to completely develop or implement. You should expect to include this section with only minor modifications in the final report.
• Project plan — this consists of a breakdown of the work to be done into phases, tasks and other activities with estimates of time to complete the work. It will specify interdependencies of tasks, critical work elements and schedule. You should indicate the work you have done so far and that you intend to do in the second term. One of the tasks should be writing the draft report.
• Log — Interim log, indicating meetings with your supervisor and reflecting the phases of the plan completed so far. The complete log may be given as an appendix to your final report.
• Proposal document — Include this document as an appendix. It is not assessed but necessary for audit purposes.
Note that the interim report can be regarded as the first version of the first chapters of your final report. You will not have the interim report attached as separate document in your final report. Instead, the sections of the interim report will appear — most likely in an updated form — in the final report (see detailed guidelines for the final report below).
Draft report
This document is a working version of the final report. It should be submitted to your supervisor in time in order to allow your supervisor sufficient time to read it and suggest improvements before you need to submit the final report.
Do not expect your supervisor to be available over the Easter break but, as long as your supervisor agrees, the deadline for submitting the draft report may be extended. Bear in mind that your supervisor is only expected to read one draft of your report.
In your own interests, the draft report should be as complete as possible so that your supervisor can give you valuable feedback. Your supervisor will be the examiner on other projects. They will tell you what they are looking for from the projects they examine. If your report does not conform to their expectations you will be able to rectify it in time.
This report is not formally assessed and should be submitted directly to your supervisor.

Final report

Preferably, final reports should be submitted using A4 paper and comb or soft. Double sided printing is encouraged, but not compulsory. You must submit two identical copies of your report to the School Office. Additionally, you must also submit an electronic version of this report and of your entire source code via the corresponding Final Year Project course page..
The word limit for the final report (excluding appendices) is 12000 words. The expectation is that most reports should contain approximately 10000 words.
The submitted report should not include a detailed listing of your program code. Instead all your code, including the usual documentation, must be submitted electronically. If you do a digital media based project (or any kind of video related project) and think you need more space, please contact your supervisor to sort out an alternative submission method. In any case, each student must submit electronically the following: the final report document and all code (in the sense of program code, e.g. Java, php, C, html) written by the student. Libraries should not be submitted but their usage must be acknowledged in the report. There is no need to include code or technical documents that have not been written by you — but you must acknowledge any such material that has been used to complete the project. It may be necessary to include other appendices, but there is an expectation that these will total no more than 20 pages.
The final report should contain the following sections in the order indicated:
• A cover sheet. – This should contain your name, your degree course and department, your candidate number, the title of the project, the name of your project supervisor and the calendar year of submission.
• A signed statement of originality together with an overview of any intellectual property rights agreements that you have made. The statement of originality should be worded as follows. ‘This report is submitted as part requirement for the degree of … at the University. It is the product of my own labour except where indicated in the text. The report may be freely copied and distributed provided the source is acknowledged.’
• Acknowledgements (optional) — this might include your supervisor(s), other students if part of a related project and any other person or organisation that has assisted in any way in the conduct of the project and its documentation.
• Summary — a one page resumé of your report.
• Table of contents (with page numbers).
• Introduction — this should give the motivation for the project. The aims of the project should at least be stated in the first paragraph, but preferably in the first sentence. The first chapter should also explain the structure of the report.
• Body of report — this should include a requirements analysis and specification of the problem you have tackled. It should also include a description of how you designed, built and evaluated your system. The exact form of this will vary from project to project but it will usually occupy several chapters and will often include sections on implementation and testing (which kinds of testing?). Any software projects should include a discussion of the principles which underlie the program that has been written: the significance of its data structures, the way that its procedures and modules interact etc. A line-by-line description of your code is not the best way of achieving this and is not encouraged.

You should evaluate your finished product using appropriate methods, backing up your claims with evidence. If reporting user feedback, this will be more convincing if it comes from a wider audience than just a small group of your peers (for example it could be gathered online via forums etc). Evaluation results should be related back to the original requirements. A summary of the evaluation should appear in the Conclusion section.
• Conclusion — this should include an assessment of the success of the finished product. Have you achieved your objectives? If not, why not? It should also contain suggestions for future extensions, or alternative methodologies that, with hindsight, might have led to a better system.
• References — these must be given correctly. Full references with page numbers are required. If you consult a similar project done in previous years you must reference it. The references should be cited in the body of your report where appropriate.  Web pages you consulted need to be listed as well. You need to add the title/topic of the Web page and the last time you accessed it, not just the URL.
• Appendices — you should include your project logs and any additional relevant system or test data as appendices. You may also include any technical material which you estimate as too detailed for the main body of the report. You should make sure that any technical material is appropriately annotated and consistently presented. The source code of your project (including documentation) must be submitted electronically and should not be included in the Appendix. Also, any material that does not fit in the report’s Appendix that you nevertheless deem important can be included in the electronic submission. Note, however, that it will be left to the markers’ discretion whether they wish to look at such extra material in the electronic submission.

Project presentation

In addition to writing the report, you will be assessed on your ability to present your project. The project presentation takes the form of a short talk.
In the talk, you should give an overview of your project and describe what you achieved. If you have written software you should demonstrate it. Your task is to convince your listeners that your project work is interesting and of high quality. It is an excellent idea to prepare your talk in advance and practice it on a friend or fellow student.

Acknowledgements

This document was originally written by Chris Thornton, and subsequently modified by Alan Jeffrey, Phil Husbands, Julian Rathke, Bernhard Reus. This is now maintained by csitinfo.com team. Some of the material was adapted from notes produced for the University of London Computer Science project assessment.

Background reading

The majority of your background reading and references will be specific to your chosen topic. For general guidance on writing your reports and preparing your presentation talk you could consult the following books:
• Turk, C. and Kirkman, J. (2001) Effective writing: improving scientific, technical and business communication. 2nd edition. London: Spon.
• Turk, C. (1985) Effective speaking: communicating in speech. London: Spon.
• Sides, C. (1992) How to write and present technical information. 2nd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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