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Project Design Document

The Project Design Document should provide a basic description of your project, why it is interesting, and why you have chosen to implement it in a particular way. Below is an outline for the document to be used as a guideline, but as long as you answer these basic issues, you can organize the report whichever way makes sense to you. The project design is a tool for you to identify and reduce project risk, and secondly to explain enough of your thinking that we can inject helpful hints.

Title of Project

with Names of group members

Project abstract

A one paragraph description of the project and why it is should be useful to someone.

Project scenario and goals

A scenario that highlights how the project will actually be used by and end-user. You might include a sketch of the UI, if there is one. Describe any special constraints (e.g., speed, size, storage, scale, robustness) your design needs to satisfy.

Design strategy

Provide a description of the overall design, its major components, and their purpose. Include an architectural diagram (showing how the components interact) if appropriate.

Design unknowns/risks

Describe the features of your design that your group is least familiar with and with which there is no prior experience. These are the issues to tackle first!

Implementation plan and schedule

Outline a plan for implementing your project. Break the project into smaller pieces, with a short (eg, one sentence) description of each piece, any inter-dependency with other pieces, along how each piece will be tested and integrated. Try to come up with a rough timeline for your work and a rough division of labor between group members. As a suggestion, try for a granularity of two-week chunks of effort per team member.

Evaluation

Explain how you will evaluate success -- what will you measure and how will you display it in the final report? What tradeoffs will you evaluate?

Related work

Search for related research papers, articles, project URLs that are relevant to your project. Write one or two sentences summarizing the similarity and/or difference with what you are proposing.

(from T. Anderson)