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SEOC2: MSc Report

NOTE: For MSc students only; UG4 students do Assignment 3 instead. But even MSc students should look at Assignment 3 to familiarize yourselves with the tasks, including the CVS and make tasks.

You should select one topic from the course syllabus and carry out a survey of interesting and important peer-reviewed academic research papers (normally at least 3 but not more than 8) strongly related to that topic, focusing on how that topic relates to large-scale, long-term software development projects.

As soon as you have chosen your topic, you should send the name of it to me. You are welcome to suggest other topic areas that are related to the course but not explicitly listed in the syllabus. No two students from the same Assignment 2 team will be allowed to choose the same topic, so you may want to include a few alternatives in case your main topic is no longer available (on a first-come, first-served basis). Topics already taken are listed on the Assignment 2 teams page. You are encouraged to work with your Assignment 2 team on general tasks like learning how to do literature searches, choosing good text preparation tools, proofreading each others' papers for typographical errors or to point out items needing clarification, discussing potential topics, etc. However, the actual content of the paper you submit must be entirely your own, individual, non-collaborative work.

The final deliverable will be a formal report on your topic (preferably using LaTeX) including:

• an introductory description of the topic,
• a coherent summary of the material in the main articles you found,
• a criticism of the content and presentation of these articles,
• a meaningful conclusion about the impact, importance, etc. of the articles you discussed, and
• a properly constructed bibliography/reference list.

As a very rough guide, a typical report might be of around 2500 words (excluding references), but particularly concise and well-presented work can receive full credit even if it is of a shorter length. Much longer reports are strongly discouraged.

The reports will be marked according to two main criteria. First, the report should demonstrate good research into the subject: choosing an interesting, relevant topic, providing adequate and accurate coverage of the field, critically comparing and reviewing the papers, choosing high-quality sources to cite, etc. Second, the report should be easily readable, i.e. well organized and clearly written. To do well on the second criterion, I highly recommend taking some time to study my notes on how to avoid common pitfalls when writing research papers.

Please try to remember that the literature review is worth only 10% of your final course mark, and thus you will probably need to limit the breadth of your literature search so that it does not become unmanageable.

Submission

Your report must be submitted by 10am Friday, 25 March, using the submit command on Informatics DICE machines (type man submit for more details). Your report should be in the form of a single plain PDF text file named paper.pdf. Be sure to verify that your PDF file is readable and looks professional in xpdf before committing to a particular word processing or text preparation system or configuration. As required by university policy, late submissions will not be accepted without good reason and will be penalized 5% per working day or part of a day.

Example of submit command:

submit msc seoc2-5 cw3 paper.pdf

Last updated: 2006/01/07 18:35:20