Department of Computer Science

College of Engineering, University of Nevada, Reno

 

CS 426 Senior Projects

 

March 8, 2004

 

Project Part III: Design

 

Due:                             Friday, March 26, at 5:00 pm, email submission (required) + hardcopy

(desired, but optional)

Points:                         100

Weight:                        13% of the course grade

 

 

A Deliverables of Part III of the Project                                                                  

 

 

Note: In the following <T3> denotes a team of three students and <T4> denotes a team of four.

 

For this part of the project you should provide a Design Document (DD) with the following structure:

 

0    Table of contents

 

1    Introduction: a general description (between 500 to 1000 words) that briefly re-states the goals of your project and gives a concise account of progress made since the previous report (specification). Indicate changes in the project, refinements, and current status.

 

2    High-level and medium-level design: present the project in terms of high level architecture, subsystems, and program units. Given the diversity of projects, there is significant flexibility here. In any case, you should include, with accompanying textual descriptions, the following:

 

-     At least one system-level diagram, e.g., context model such as the one shown in Chapter 6 of the CS 425 textbook, block diagram such as shown in Chapter 10 of the same book, the layered architecture of the system similar to the one in Fig 17.10 of the CS 426 book, or (for web-based applications only) a site map;

-     The structuring of your software in program units. In the case of object-oriented solutions, the classes are examples of such program units, hence a design class diagram with details of attributes, operations, relationships, and multiplicity constraints should be provided (at least 10 classes are expected). Briefly describe the role of each class as well as the methods included in the classes. In non-object oriented solutions, program units can be modules, functions, procedures, subroutines, etc. Show the organization (hierarchical or not) of these units (at least 10 units are expected) and provide for each of them: name, description, the higher level unit (e.g., subsystem) to which the program unit belongs, its input, its output, program units called by this unit, its exceptions or interrupts, and any additional comments that could enhance the description of the unit.

-     If database tables are used, for each table indicate its fields (columns) and its primary key(s). For instance, a table containing information on employees may look like the following one (note that the primary key, shown in bold, is SSN):

 

SSN

Last Name

First Name

Position

Department

Office

Telephone

Email

 

3    Detailed design: include several details on the low-level design of your software.Teams <T3> should provide a total of 6 examples (items) of detailed design, while team <T4> should provide 8 such items. Any combination of items is allowed as long as two of the following three types of items are illustrated:

 

-     Flowchart or pseudo-code of a method (in object-oriented solution) or of a program unit (non-object-oriented solution);

-     Statechart of a class, set of classes, subsystem, or system;

-     Activity chart of the system, a subsystem, set of subsystems, class, program unit, set of classes, or set of program units.

 

For example, a team <T3> can provide 5 flowcharts and one statechart or 4 pseudo-code examples and 2 activity charts or 2 flowcharts and 2 statecharts and 2 activity charts, and so forth. It is required that in this section you present some more complex items of detailed design and avoid simple examples.

 

4    User interface design: provide at least nine (for <T3>) or twelve (for <T4>) snapshots of the user interface, with accompanying descriptions. In these snapshots, details of the user interface (e.g., panels, toolbars, menus, menu items, buttons, textboxes, etc. for GUI or complete screenshots for text-based interface) should be presented, the format used in reports and statistics should be shown (if applicable), and samples of messages to the user should be provided. 

 

5    Annotated references: describe how the project references (project domain book and four reference articles) relate to your project. The description for the book should be between 300 and 500 words, and for each article between 100 and 200 words.   

 

6    Contributions of team members.

 

7    [Optional, but highly recommended] Glossary updates: include here new additions to the project glossary that you wrote for the second part of the project (SRS).   

 

 

C    Grading of Project Part III: Design 

 

  1. Overall presentation of the DD (all sections)          20 points
  2. High and medium-level design (section 2)             25 points                            
  3. Low-level design (section 3)                                25 points                              
  4. User-interface design (section 4)                         30 points                            

------                                                                  -----------

Total                                                                 100 points

   

Note that both the technical content and the presentation style (including quality of writing and document formatting) of your design document will be taken into consideration when grading the project.