The Class Project - CSCI 558L, Fall 2010

There are several steps involved in the process:

• Selecting a project
• Designing the project
• Implementation
• Project report
• Demonstration

Important deadlines:

• Project selection, due 11:45PM, 10/13/2010.
• Project design document, due 11:45PM, 11/3/2010.
• Project report, due 11:45PM, 12/12/2010.

You can do a project individually, or in teams of two (larger teams are not allowed). Be aware that:

• Team projects often have big payoffs, but in some cases, one student ends up carrying more programming load.
• With team projects, each group member must e-mail a commitment form (please modify with your information) to the instructor and copy your e-mail to your partner. Basically, you have to agree to getting the same score as your partner no matter what happens.

You should send your project selection to the instructor via a text e-mail to the instructor by 11:45pm, 10/13/2010. In your e-mail, you should include the following:

• A one paragraph (no more than 10 lines) description of the project.
• Your resource requirement.
• Who your partner is (if any).

The main parts for your project must be implemented in C/C++ (sorry, no Java). An exception may be made for Java for large Open Source projects written in Java. If you would like to make modifications and introduct new features to such a system, please talk to the instructor as early as possible.

The output of this step will be a small design document (in PDF format) in which you will:

• list relevant reading for the project (if any)
• briefly discuss how the software system that you are working on is structured
• list all the software changes that you expect to make and describe your software design (you should include block diagrams if they are appropriate)
• describe what you are planning on demoing, the more details the better
• list your development resource needs (i.e., how many machines and do they have to be exclusive for your project)
• specify the implementation assignment of each member if you are doing a group project

After you have submitted the design document, the instructor may negotiate with you to increase or decrease the scope of your work. This is necessary to make sure that each student does projects of comparable difficulty.

If you are running Windows and you don't have anything that generates PDF files, you can give the free bullzip PDF printer a try.

• Implement your project with multiple shortterm goals to gradually reach the final goal.
• Solve problems that were not expected in the design phase.
• Find resources from the web and through communications.
• Prepare to spend significant amount of time in debugging and testing.

You are required to submit your project report tarball after your demo. For a team project, only one team member needs to submit. It is due 11:45PM, 12/12/2010.

Your report (please name it "project.pdf") should include the following contents:

1. Briefly describe the goal of your project and background information, such as the hardware and software you have used.
2. Describe your implementation details. For a team project, specify which part is implemented by each member.
3. Have you met the goal outlined in your design document? If not, why? and what is the final result of your project? Describe any deviation from your design document, if applicable.
4. What you have learned by doing this project? Have you learned to use a specific set of APIs, toolkits, and system calls that you were not familiar with before? If you encountered difficult problems during your progress, briefly describe them and your solutions.
5. Describe, in detail, how to unpack, apply patch, build, and install your project (and integrate it into the system).
6. Describe what was demonstrated during the demo. If you have written some scripts, please explain what each of them do. Describe, in detail, how to run all the steps in your demo. If you have your own configuration file, please explain the file format, possible values of all fields, and what values to use in each step of your demo.
7. List all related resources and references, such as papers, RFCs, manuals, online tutorials, hardware and software systems, etc.

If you are starting from scratch, please include your source code in your submission. You may include an optional README file to document your code.

Finally, you should tar and gzip your report, patchfile or source code that you wrote, scripts you used in your demo, and call it "project.tar.gz" and submit it electronically.

If there are things that were broken during the demo and you have fixed them in your final code, please mention them in your project report.

• Use up to 10 minutes to set up your demo.
• Use 5 minutes to describe your demo.
• Use 30 minutes to show your demo and answer questions.

Design document:		10%
Demonstration:		65%
Project report:		25%

You get no points for submitting the project selection email, but you will get a maximum of 10% deduction if you do not submit the email by the deadline. [BC: added 10/7/2010] Beyond the grace period of the submission deadline, you will lose 1% for every 5 minutes.

We will assign letter grades to various parts of your project. The conversion from a letter grade to a numeric score (for the project) is done according to the following table:

Grade		Points
A		50
A-		44
B+		36
B		30
B-		24
C+		16
C		10
C-		4
F		0