CS480 Milestone 4

Winter Session 2007



Purpose of this Milestone

The general purpose of this milestone is to provide a final report of activities carried out since the previous milestone, as well as the state of the project at its conclusion. This will also include a demonstration of accomplishments, and a presentation as well. Hopefully, the project will have met the objectives and milestones as discussed in earlier reports in the course.

Assigned

Wednesday, March 12, 2008 (please check the main course website regularly for any updates or revisions)

Due

The documentation for Milestone 4 is due Wednesday, April 9, 2008 by midnight in the CS470/CS480 locker (locker 314, third floor of Middlesex College near the elevator).

Late Penalty

Late milestone documentation will be accepted for up to five days after the due date, with weekends counting as a single day; the late penalty is 10% of the available marks per day. Lateness is based on the time the submission is removed from the locker, not on the time it was printed.

Group Effort

Your work towards this milestone is expected to be a group effort, although there is an individual component as well. How you decide to divide up this work is up to you.

What to Hand in

Your milestone documentation must be typed, not written. It should be submitted to the course locker in a 9" by 12" envelope that has the course name and your names on the outside. The documentation should also include a cover page including the course name and group member names and student numbers. Details on the documentation's content are discussed below.

In order to retrieve your milestone documentation once it is marked, a group ticket will be printed by the marker and attached to the envelope containing your work. Using this ticket, any group member should be able to collect your marked documentation from the I/O counter (theoretically). Alternatively, this documentation may be simply returned by your teaching assistant during one of your regularly scheduled group meetings, or by your instructor during office hours.

As well, you are required to submit your milestone documents electronically. You must store all of the files for your submission in a directory called Milestone4. From the directory that contains Milestone4 as a subdirectory, you will issue the command:

submit cs480 Milestone4

to submit your assignment electronically. If you've done it right, you'll receive an e-mail confirming the fact shortly afterward.

Documentation

In terms of documentation, Milestone 4 requires the submission of a Final Project Report (to be completed by the group) and a Work Log and a Peer and Self Evaluation (to be completed by each member of the group individually). Each of these items are discussed in further detail in the sections below.

Final Project Report (10% of Final Mark)

The purpose of the final project report is to provide a final discussion of the tangible outcomes of the project, indicating the objectives and milestones completed in the project. The report should also discuss objectives and milestones that were not completed, as well as other potential directions for work in the future that were discovered during the project.

As such, it should address the following questions:

Once again, in creating this document, please take care to organize and structure it carefully so that all of the required information can be found easily. Furthermore, feel free to make use of charts, graphs, calendars, or other visual aids to represent information to improve the readability of the document.

As discussed above, this document is expected to be the result of the efforts of the entire group. How exactly this is to be done is left to the group to decide.

Work Log (2% of Final Mark)

Work logs are to be prepared by each member of the group individually. As such, they may be submitted with other milestone documentation all together, or they may be submitted separately by each individual group member; the choice is up to you.

Once again, the work log shall be a week-by-week breakdown of the number of hours worked, and the tasks worked on since the start of the project. (For our purposes, this can start with the first group meeting, or earlier, if work had been completed earlier as well.) Deviations from the project plan should be noted and explained appropriately. If anything else noteworthy occurred during a week, it should be explained or discussed as well.

Again, please be sure to organize and structure your work log appropriately. While this should not at all be a lengthy document, it should be at least broken into sections on a week-by-week basis as well. Ultimately, the layout is up to you. As long as the work log provides enough information that the instructor and teaching assistant have a very good idea as to what you've been up to project-wise, then you have done a good job.

Peer and Self Evaluation (4% of Final Mark)

Peer and Self Evaluations are also to be prepared by each member of the group individually. It is recommended that you submit this document separately from the rest of your group for obvious reasons.

The goal of this document is to provide a brief assessment of your own performance in the project, as well as the performance of the other members of the group. Any discussion of group member performance will naturally be kept private and will not be disclosed to other members of your group.

To keep things simple for the time being, you should rate each member of your group, including yourself, as having performance that is either "satisfactory" or "not satisfactory". Each such assessment should have a brief justification as to why that rating has been applied. (Of course, you are free to provide as much information as you deem appropriate.) If someone has performed well above expectations, then it would be nice for that to be noted as well. Also, please discuss how much you have worked with each group member in your assessment, so that this may be taken into account.

All in all, this document should be brief, with a short paragraph assessing each group member's performance.

Instructor Evaluation (4% of Final Mark)

The instructor evaluation is a mark assigned to each individual in the group by the instructor and teaching assistant in the course, based on overall performance in the course. Consequently, there is nothing to be submitted for this portion of the milestone.

Demonstration and Presentation (10% and 10% of Final Mark Respectively)

In addition to the project documentation described above, this milestone also requires a demonstration of the project in its final state and a presentation of this work. This demonstration and presentation will occur during scheduled class time on April 9, 2008, the last class of the year.

The presentation should cover the accomplishments discussed in the Final Project Report as detailed above. While the focus should be on what has been accomplished, a discussion of issues or problems encountered should be included, as well as outstanding work left to do. The presentation should also nicely lead into the demonstration of what has been done.

The demonstration will be a live demonstration of what has been accomplished. This should give a good view of everything done in the project, and allow everyone to see your accomplishments in action.

Together, the demonstration and presentation will be allotted 30 minutes of class time. It is up to you to decide how to structure your demonstration and presentation, and it up to you as a group to decide who will be playing what role(s) in the proceedings. This is intended to be a culmination of group effort, even if not everyone is actively involved in the actual demonstration or presentation, although that would likely be a good experience for all.

Source Code Submission (10% of Final Mark)

To complete this milestone, the final source code for the project must also be submitted. It is expected that the code should be reasonably well structured, documented, and styled, to ease possible maintenance activities in the future.