A Guide to Dr. Young’s CS331 Project Report Writing Prepared by Dominick Atanasio daatanasio@cpp.edu (former grader of this class, currently a CS lecturer)

Introduction Most professors expect a report as part of your project submission Our major requires physics and other science-based studies with labs is to expose us to the scientific method Every project should be undertaken as an experiment The experiment constitutes a majority of the project’s grade The code itself only represents a small portion of the overall grade

Identifying the Expectations of the Project The primary source is the project specifications document Do not lose grading points because you did not understand the project’s requirements Best approach to beginning work on a project Read the project specifications and highlight the requirements Read the specifications again writing the requirements in your own words Essentially, create your own version of the project specifications Read the project specifications a third time and compare your version to the professor's

Identifying the Expectations of the Project If you have any doubt about what you are required to do, talk with a classmate Compare your idea of what is expected with theirs Speak with the professor during office hours Do not lose points because you do not completely understanding the requirements of the project

Setting Up Your Experiment Design Notes Before you write a single line of code, create a document to record design notes about your experiment Record your ideas on how best to test your code for correctness Record how you will generate test data with an explanation of why you chose the test data that you did

Setting Up Your Experiment Design Notes Document the methods that you plan to use to collect your experimental data Document how you plan to visually demonstrate the results (graphs and tables) These graphs will help you get a better understanding of the implications of the experiment results as well Record the strengths and constraints of your experiment’s design

Data Sets and the Charts that Explain Them The resulting data from your experiment must be included in your report. Make sure to label the table(s) The column or row headings of the data table must display the units of measure The units can be placed in an outer heading or caption

Data Sets and the Charts that Explain Them The purpose of charts is to visually depict the implications of the data Chose a chart or charts that will best present the results Make sure to label the charts No units of measure and/or no legends explaining the domain and range will cost you points Make sure the lines of the chart are distinguishable from one another use color use line styles

Writing the Report Use a line spacing of 1.5 lines Separate your sections with an extra newline Use bold section titles Consider how you will partition your report Creats sections that closely follow the project specs and/or grading cover sheet. Confirms that you are meeting all of the project’s requirements A well-organized report aides in the grading of the project The grader can easily check that the project’s requirements are met

Writing the Report Every section of the report should have a section title. These titles can closely mimic the project requirements or grading sheet The project specification may include questions that you are required to answer. These questions should be reformatted to act as a section title. The section that it entitles will contain the answer to the question

Writing the Report Consider the voice with which you write your report Consider your grammar Break large sentences into smaller less complicated ones Do not use contractions in your writing (e.g., “that’s”, “I’m”, etc)

Writing the Report There are three cases of complexity to consider when comparing theoretical or empirical time complexity; best-case, worst-case, and average-case When you write about an algorithm’s time complexity you need to properly describe it If you are only consider average time complexity be sure to label it as such

Writing the Report When discussing the setup of your experiment, be sure to explain why you chose the test data that you used You may need to explain why using simple values has no effect on the algorithm’s complexity Explain why you chose certain values for testing the correctness of your implementation yet chose to use other values when running your experiment

Strengths and Constraints The strengths of your approach deal with efforts that you made to increase the reliability of the experiment’s results or to more efficiently implement an algorithm Include methods used to make the code more efficient Steps that you took to better isolate each test run Consider the strengths and constraints throughout the lifecycle of the project Record them while designing the experiment and implementing the code

Strengths and Constraints Use the project's suggestions for test inputs Consider how those values may reduce the complexity of your code Include restrictions on the input data as constraints to your experiment Your equipment or the programming language may pose a constraint to the experiment Do not reduce the number of sample runs to accommodate more time-consuming input data This is not a competition to see how large of a value of n your code can handle

Strengths and Constraints Do not run the tests concurrently Running tests concurrently could result in one test’s resource consumption disproportionately affecting the runtime of another If you show off your programming prowess, do it by writing well thought-out, clean, high-performance code Writing a threaded test routine is not a constraint or a strength; it is a mistake Watching videos or listening to music on the test computer while running tests is not a constraint

Section-size Requirements Your attention to detail (the quality of your analysis) will be evident in the size of the sections that you write Be as detailed as you can when writing Do not leave out even trivial information about the setup and execution of the experiment You will not bore the grader A good example is the Strengths and Constraints section: at a minimum it should consume half of a page

Section-size Requirements When portraying your dataset, and the charts that describe it, use as much space as you need to paint an understandable and accurate picture of your findings When comparing algorithms or theories, spend some time trying to fully understand the implications of your experiment’s results before you begin writing; then, do not leave anything to the imagination when expressing your conclusions These comparison sections should consume at least half of a page each

Section-size Requirements Charts can each consume an entire page if it aides in viewing the chart’s detail

Your Code The inclusion of your code part of your report Well written code can be self-commenting Do not include comments if its purpose is obvious Avoid using comments altogether if close consideration is given to variable and method names Observe the best practices of software design If you feel that you need to include comments, then make sure they are succinct and to the point

Submitting Your Code Hard Copy Expect that the grader will have to read the hard copy Format your code to minimize the amount of line-wrapping Reduce the size of the indents Print your code in landscape

Academic Integrity You are responsible for doing your own work and for insuring that your work is protected from copying Usually the originator and copier of the work will receive zero points (or maybe worse) Share pseudocode and ideas, nothing else If you find Internet source, only use as an instructional, do not copy and paste it