COMP390/393/394/395: Design Documentation and Presentation

Background

By this stage of the project you should have completed most of the research and analysis required for your project and so have a clear idea of how you will realise your project. Typically this understanding will be recorded in a design using some standard methodology, such as UML. The purpose of these two deliverables is to present the design both in a written form and orally. Both the documentation and the presentation are assessed and constitute 15% of the total project mark. The mark for the design deliverables will reflect both the quality of the detailed design documentation and the quality of the presentation. The assessment will be done by your supervisor and the marker. For Work Based Learning projects, the assessors of the design stage are the supervisor and the industrial sponsor. The grade will be made available about 2 weeks after the end of the presentation weeks.

Design Documentation - Overview

This deliverable should comprise a brief summary of your activities since the specification was produced, and a plan of what you intend to do in the realisation phase of the project, together with a full documentation of your design. This documentation will depend on your chosen methodology, but should cover all aspects of the system, at an appropriate level of detail. One printed copy of the design documentation must be given to Mrs Janet Lowry in the student office (G/F Ashton Building), and its pdf version must be submitted through the E-project, both by Friday 18 November, 2011 (noon). The University late submission policy would apply with respect to the latest of the printed copy and electronic submissions.

Design Presentation: Overview

The design presentation will be given during either the week beginning 21 or 28 November, 2011 (depending on the availability of markers). It is intended to give a description of what you have done by way of design, rather than a detailed presentation of the design itself. Details will be given in the documentation submitted earlier.

Powerpoint is strongly recommended for the presentation. You should give copies of your presentation to the assessors. (If you are using power point, you can make the copies using the 6 to a page handout option). 20 minutes will be allocated for the presentation, including questions from the assessors.

For your guidance a copy of the feedback form that will be used to assess your design documentation and presentation is here.

Attending presentations of other students.

Starting from this year, you are allowed to invite up to four of your peers to attend your design presentation. This is an opportunity to provide an additional feedback to the presenter, as well as to extend learning experience of the attendees. However, in order not to disturb the usual conduct of the presentations, there are strict rules governing additional attendance.

The student presenting his/her work can invite up to four other project students to attend the presentation. No other person (including students who do not take COMP390/393/394/395) should be allowed to attend.
The list of invited students has to be sent to the supervisor and marker before the presentation.
The invited students may enter the room only with the presenting student, before the presentation. Assessors may not allow late invited students enter.
No audio/video recording is allowed.
The invited students should not interrupt the presentation in any way, unless there is a spare time after assessors have asked their questions and the assessors explicitly allow the attending students to ask questions and to provide an informal feedback.

Documentation and Presentation: Structure

Both the documentation and the presentation should have the following structure (at different levels of detail as explained above):

1. Summary of Proposal

A brief statement of the background, aims and objectives of the project , including any necessary changes to the original proposal or specification, based on new information or understanding.

A summary of the research and analysis carried out so far should also be included.

2. Design

In the presentation, an outline of the design should be given (with full details of the design in the report), according to methodology and techniques chosen in the specification. Although designs will vary according to the needs of particular projects a typical design of a software implementation will comprise

a description of the anticipated components of the system and how they are to be organised;
a description of data structures to be used by the system;
algorithms to manipulate these data structures;
a design of the intended interfaces; and
a description of the evaluation of the system.

Remember that the presentation should summarise the design work you have carried out: the talk is not intended to present all the details of the design.

The design should include both the system design and evaluation design.

Some examples are given below.

If following an object-oriented design methodology one might include:

Use-case diagrams;
An interaction chart (sometimes called an event trace);
The objects to be used in the system;
Attributes and methods of objects;
Pseudo-code for the key methods;
Interface design;
Evaluation design.

what criteria will be used to evaluate whether the system is suceesful;
how to assess these criteria;
who will be involved in the evaluation;
what testing will be carried out;
what kind of conclusion do you expect from evaluation.

If following a more traditional design methodology one might include some of the following:

Data dictionaries;
System boundary diagrams;
Entity-relationship diagrams;
Logical table structures;
Physical table structures;
Transaction matrix;
Pseudo-code for the key methods;
Interface design;
Some other additional design methods may be included;

Data flow diagram;
Navigation path diagrams;
Storyboards;
Functional descriptions or components.

Evaluation design.

what criteria will be used to evaluate whether the system is suceesful;
how to assess these criteria;
who will be involved in the evaluation;
what testing will be carried out;
what kind of conclusion do you expect from evaluation.

For a project involving the empirical investigation of some hypothesis one would normally expect to see in addition things such as:

A statement of the hypotheses to be tested;
A description of the test data to be used;
An experiment design, the experiments to be performed, any control to be used;
A description of how the results will be analysed, including any statistical techniques that will be used;
Anticipated conclusions.

For a project attempting to devise new algorithms one would normally expect to see in addition things such as:

A description of the problem to be solved;
A description of the existing algorithms of related problem and a critical evaluation of them (e.g., why they are not applicable in your project);
A description of the approach used to solve the problem;
A description of how the new algorithms will be analysed, including mathematical and experimental analysis;
For the mathematical analysis to be carried out
- A description of the mathematical model to be used;
- A description of the performance metric the algorithm will be measured, ranging from correctness, running time, optimally or approximibility for some objective functions;
- A description of the control against which your algorithm is compared, e.g., the optimal algorithm;
For the experimental analysis to be carried out

An experiment design, the experiments to be performed, any control to be used;

A description of how the results will be analysed, including any statistical techniques that will be used;

The important thing is that the documentation and the presentation clearly show a design methodology to have been followed, and that the design has been carried out with sufficient attention to detail to inspire confidence that it can be realised, tested and evaluated in the time remaining for the project.

3. Review against Plan

This is the plan produced as part of the specification, showing what has been completed, and the progress to date. Any necessary changes to the plan should be indicated also. (You are expected to include the Gantt Chart again.)