CS11 Project Plan Outline

Create a document that contains each of these sections, and send it to your CS11 instructor. Your document must be in one of the following formats:

• Plain text
• HTML

Do not submit MSWord documents or PDF files. TeX documents are also a pain.

Title

In a phrase or sentence, describe what your project is.

Description

Briefly describe your project in 1-2 paragraphs, covering what interesting features or implementation details you intend to cover.

Programming Language(s)

List the language(s) you will implement this project in. If any of these languages are unfamiliar to you, make a note of that.

External Libraries

List any external libraries (i.e. libraries that are not a standard component of the language you have chosen) that you will be using. Note any of these libraries that are unfamiliar to you.

Risk Analysis

Identify any aspects of your project that could potentially hinder your progress in completing it. This could include the following:

• Lack of familiarity with particular aspects of the problem domain that you want to focus on. Example:

  "I don't know how hard it will be to get the fluid dynamics computations correct, since I haven't done that before."

• Lack of familiarity with particularly important or challenging aspects of a language or library that you intend to use. Example:

  "I don't know how to debug Cg GPU shader programs, so it is possible that I will run into bugs that are difficult to identify quickly."

• Uncertainty about the feasibility of being able to perform a particular task with a chosen library or language. Example:

  "I don't know if the Java Native Interface (JNI) will allow me to move my data from Java code to C code at the throughput necessary for a reasonable frame rate."

• Uncertainty as to whether a particular language or library has support on the desired target platform. Example:

  "I'm not sure if the MP3 encoding library I want to use will compile on MacOSX, where I ultimately want to deploy my project."

For any risk items you list, briefly state what you intend to do to mitigate that risk.

Implementation Plan

Write up an outline of how you intend to go about implementing this project. Be as specific as possible. If there are stages of your project where you don't know how you are going to implement them, make sure to note this.

This plan should take into account the above risk analysis. If there are specific risk items, focus on them first! Software project management is largely about identifying and controlling risk.

It is acceptable to set aside some time for testing/debugging your project. The result of such a step should be either an automated test suite, or a set of well-documented test scenarios that one can walk through.

Source Code Availability

You need to make your source code available to your CS11 instructor. There are three options. Feel free to provide more than one option. A website is particularly recommended for purposes of coordination.

• If you are familiar with source code management systems (e.g. CVS or Subversion), state the details of how to connect to the repository and download a copy of the source code.
• If you don't know what all that is about, state your CS cluster username here, and the directory on your CS account where you will make your source code available. Make sure that this directory exists, and that it is read-accessible to people other than you!
• It is also strongly recommended that you provide a website for your project, where you post updates, documentation, and any other important details. You can use your CS cluster account for doing this, by putting your HTML files into your ~/public_html directory of your CS cluster account. Then it can be accessed like this:

    http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~someuser

  (Where, of course, someuser is your CS cluster account name.)