CMSC 424 Project Reports and Milestones

Time-stamp: "2000-10-04 16:43:31 chaw"

This semester, there will be fewer project reports, meaning some of the following will be merged. However, the following list should give you a general idea of what's expected.

Here are tentative guidelines for the project reports and associated milestones; we will elaborate on these in class.

• PR1: short team-identifier; names of team members; short description of application; description of proposed functionality with concrete examples; outline of user interface; sources of data; explanation of how project satisfies requirements of size, ad-hoc queries, and concurrent conflicting updates; 2000 words max.

  Milestone1: Familiar with teammates, their interests, strengths, and weaknesses. imaginary demo; rough architecture; list of software to be used (DBMS, programming languages, libraries, etc.) experimeted with database systems; created, queried toy examples;

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• PR2: E-R and ODL designs; progress report; 500 words max.

  Milestone2: Completed conceptual database design; simple user interface running; finalized software choices; obtained data.

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• PR3: Relational schema based on design of PR2 (modified if needed); 500 words max.

  Milestone3: Completed most of user interface; loaded data; implemented a few transactions.

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• PR4: Short descriptions of transaction types and concurrency-control scheme; description of advanced functions (back office, interesting SQL queries); 1000 words max.

  Milestone4: Implemented initial concurrency control scheme; basic demo functions working.

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• PR5: Progress report; description of constraints and active features and their implementation; 1000 words max.

  Milestone5: Reasonable demo working.

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• PR6: Progress report; 1000 words max.

  Milestone6: Clean-up, fixes, enhancements.

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• PR7: Part 1: final project report; 2000 words max. Part 2: documentation; 5000 words max. Part 3: source code (tar'red and gzip'ed); electronic submission only; Part 4: all earlier reports.

  Milestone: All done!

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• Notes:
  • Word-count limits are strict. Over-the-limit reports will be penalized. Figures contribute to the word-count an amount equal to the number of words in the figure.
  • Use a 12-point, serif (*not* sans serif) font with at least 1 inch margins. Use two-sided printing if possible. Make sure all figures are clear. Violations will be penalized.
  • For each PR submission, attach all previous PR submissions.
  • You may submit reports electronically, but only in PDF format. If, for some reason, you're using nonstandard fonts, make sure you embed them in your submission.
  • If you are unsure of anything, please see me. You are welcome to show me a preview version of your report if you'd like me to quickly check for major problems.

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