Assessment Information

This module will have 2 assessments worth a total of 25%.

Assessment ONE

Assessment 1 is worth 5%
Due date: 9am Monday 30th April
Submission via Moodle - note Moodle enforces deadline
See plagiarism statement below.
Groups of 2 per project

Background: The Innova Company has made a strategic decision that it wants to improve its competency in software development. The company develops software applications for the education industry. The development technology used by Innova in the past has traditionally been on large mainframes using third generation technology. While the company has been successful it has done so through dedicated support teams which have had to fix many product defects reported by customers. Innova’s products have a current defect rate is 8 defects/kloc with MTTF of 2 days. Innova currently has 2 million lines of code in the field. University customers are demanding higher quality products and are moving to the client server paradigm. Senior management at Innova has recently completed a new product strategy exercise and has decided that for Innova to be successful it is imperative that a new set of products be developed to replace the legacy ones. One of Innova’s large education industry customers is Dublin City University. DCU is an institution that asks its suppliers to assess and to improve their 12207 Software life-cycle processes.

Innova management has developed a vision that includes a new suite of web enabled, client server products developed using modern technology while in parallel improving its assessed CMMI maturity to Level 3. The early estimate of size of the new product suite is 1.5 million lines of code. A significant improvement in product quality (less the 1 defect/kloc) and reliability (MTTF of 2 months), ease of use, and early key customer involvement are product goals. Productivity metrics also need to be defined for the new technology that will encourage reuse. All of the work is to be done in the company facility. Innova software development has traditionally depended on system test to find most of its development defects.

Problem: The new project has not yet started. You have been selected as part of a team to define the software development process that will allow the company to meet its vision. Since time is short as much reuse of available materials is encouraged. The successful team will complete the following:

Define goals - company, product, and process.
Assumptions about the Innova Company, new product suite and missing items from the Case needed to make the process and plan successful.
Define a Software Development Process, using the Process Framework, with all of the necessary process definitions that will allow Innova to be successful in meeting its vision and new product suite goals.

Assessment TWO

Assessment 2 will be a term paper (report) style project worth 20%. You are to research and prepare a short critical report a topic of your choice related to software process and/or software process improvement, as below:

Topics

You can choose any topic listed on our syllabus, or another topic related to software process and/or software process improvement. Your topic can be narrowly defined (e.g. deploying CMMI in small companies), broadly defined (e.g. Process Assessment), or something in between (e.g. Standards Based Process Improvement). If in any doubt discuss your proposed topic with the lecturer.

Your discussion of the state of the art (section 2) will depend on the relative depth/breadth of your topic. For example, you might devote the bulk of your discussion to a particular approach followed by a brief comparison with other approaches. Alternatively, you could give a very brief overview of several approaches followed by a relatively detailed comparison. In either case, you should briefly mention alternative approaches, if appropriate.

The typical/sample table of contents / layout of such a report is given below, along with an indication of relative size of report sections. However, individual students should feel free to adapt the structure to suite the topic they have chosen. You may wish to consult your lecturer for advice.

Background (about 20% of content)
- What aspects of process and/or software process improvement are addressed by this topic?
- Why is this important?
State of the art (about 50% of content)
- What are the current practices?
- What are the strengths / weaknesses?
- How do these practices compare with other major approaches?
- What is industrial practice?
- What are the alternatives? (If appropriate)
Current issues and future directions (about 30% of content)
- What problems/issues remain unsolved?
- What are the industrial problems?
- What research is being done to address these issues?
- How will current research affect future practice?

Formatting guidline

Standard formatting should correspond to the follows:

A4 page size, not letter or custom 1 inch margins top, bottom, left, right
Text to be Times new roman or similar, size 10 or similar
Heading level 1 Bold + 2 point size larger than text Heading level 2 Bold + 1 point size larger than text
Heading level 3 should not be necessary and are discouraged
References must adhere to a recognized standard
As an example, here is a standard academic conference paper formatting guideline in MS Word and PDF that you may like to consider

Size of report

Each paper should be between 3000 and 4000 words not including diagrams/tables/illustrations
Papers should not significantly exceed 4000 words
Papers which are significantly under under 3000 words will be marked accordingly

Research

You will need to do some research beyond what you will find in textbooks or our course materials. You should conduct a search of work related to your topic that is being published in current journals and conferences. The DCU Library has excellent on-line resources to help in your research. The best databases to search are: ACM Digital Library the IEEE Xplore Digital Library and Science Direct. The best research papers are often found in top ranked journals such as: Journal of Sytems and Software, Information and Software Technology, Software Process Improvement and Practice, Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering and ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology.

Assesment criteria

Marks will be awarded for content (ie. analysis, discussion, background research, etc.), with presentation being a secondary consideration However, as you have access to "superior" computer facilities available in the University, we expect documents to have a reasonably high level of presentation.

Deadline

Due date: 9am Monday 30th April
Submission via Moodle - note Moodle enforces deadline
See plagiarism statement below.
- This project will make use of TurnItIn plagiarism software system.

Any project which is not received by the deadline will automatically receive a mark of zero (FAIL). There will be no exceptions to this.

If you have a specific reason (e.g., illness) for not submitting you may write to the Programme Board explaining the situation and enclosing appropriate documentation (e.g., a doctor's certificate). This can be done by submitting a letter to the Faculty Office. Under such circumstances you will still be awarded a mark of zero (FAIL), but your case will be discussed by the Programme Board.

Plagarism

See both the School statement and University statement on plagiarism

All cases or suspected cases of plagiarism will be referred to the Disciplinary Committee

ALL projects must contain the following statement on the top page 1:

I the undersigned declare that the project material, which I now submit, is my own work. Any assistance received by way of borrowing from the work of others has been cited and acknowledged within the work. I make this declaration in the knowledge that a breach of the rules pertaining to project submission may carry serious consequences.

TurnItIn

All reports will be submitted from Moodle automatically to Turnitin which checks the documents for originality and detects plaragism.