Project Plan

Due: original version by Friday April 8, 23:00
Due: revised version by Wednesday April 13, 23:00

The requirements of this assignment is changed on Friday April 15, please make sure you read it through again.

You have decided your project now, so we want to know more about your definition of your problem and your plan of how you will solve it. We want to see a project plan that answers all parts of the Heilmeier Catechism:

• What are you trying to do? Articulate your objectives using absolutely no jargon.
• How is it done today, and what are the limits of current practice?
• What's new in your approach and why do you think it will be successful?
• Who cares?
• If you're successful, what difference will it make?
• What are the risks and the payoffs?
• How much will it cost? How long will it take?
• What are the midterm and final "exams" to check for success?

Besides, we also want you to include architectural diagram that indicates the major components of the system along with the inputs and outputs.

Tips

• Justify every claim.
• Cite related work properly, using a bibliography. Don't just put the related work there, but also explain what it does and how it differs from your own work.
• Write your project plan for someone who knows nothing about the project, not for your teammates or the course staff who already have some background.
• You can also look at Writing a Technical Paper by Michael Ernst when you compose your documents.

Deliverables

You can organize your answers to questions in Helimeier Catechism anyway you want. Naturally, it will include:

• detailed description of the problem
• how you will evaluate your work, including the exact methodology, subject programs and objective metrics (measurements) that you will collect to determine success
• detailed week-by-week schedule that gets your project complete by the end of the quarter, with concrete, measureable, goals for each week

The project plan should be 5 - 6 pages long. A pdf file should be turned in in Catalyst Dropbox.