You must submit a project diary along with the interim and final reports. Although the diary is submitted only at these times, your supervisor will expect to review it regularly and to initial it as having been seen. The diary must be written as you go along, not after the fact! The diary is intended to be a looseleaf collection of informal notes for your benefit. For example you may find it surprisingly difficult to remember why you made certain design decisions six months earlier, or may have lost a reference to a paper or web page you found useful. Every entry should have a date so the history of the work can be reviewed. At a minimum the diary must contain:
Be honest in your diary! You will not be penalised for recording things that went wrong. On the contrary, a diary that reports smooth progress may look suspicious. Do not try to go back over your diary and edit out the 'problematic' parts.
The project diary will be formally reviewed by your supervisor and your second marker at both the interim and final stages of the project. The diary is not assessed in itself, but it is when allocating a technical grade. For example, your diary could confirm a methodical approach to the project or could act as evidence of difficulties beyond your control.
The following suggests the kinds of things your diary might contain.
Student: Kurt Jenner, 9801432
Supervisor: Dr. John Brown
25/05/09: Agreed preliminary project definition with JB
To Do: Write up more detailed project plan over summer, get hold of Recommendation Q.1200
18/08/09: Meeting with JB
Reported work over the summer: studied IN recommendations, looked at BT's Select Services, experimented with Visual C++.
JB suggests using Java rather than C++ for implementation. Also look at papers in LNCS 1049 and March 09 issue of CACM. Study credit card billing and charge card services first; leave call waiting and call return till later.
To Do: For next meeting, update project plan with changed deliverables. Get hold of good Java book! Check SUN web site for current version of Spring.
20/08/09: Downloaded JDK 1.7 but it doesn't work. Maybe the search path is wrong or I forgot to install some classes?
21/08/09: Got Java working - wrong version of class library. 'Hello World' and 'Calculator' examples run OK. Found a URL that explains how Tomcat handles Java:
http://developer.expertz.com/docs/manuals/htmlguid/index.htm
Also found Hinge & Bracket book in library on developing telecomms software in Java. Don't forget to reference JB's most recent paper:
John Brown. An Architectural Foundation for Relating Features. In P. Dini, R. Boutaba and L. Logrippo, editors, Proc. Feature Interactions in Telecommunication Networks, pages 226-241, IOS Press, Amsterdam, 2008.
Found following picture in this paper. Stick into dissertation, but get permission first!!
Up one level to CSC9Z* (Honours Project)