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Contents and organization of project final reports

Software documentation is often published in separate volumes called User's Guide, Reference Manual, and Design Document. Results of testing software are not usually published outside of an organization's development group, and (unfortunately for later maintainers) may not be documented at all. For the projects for this course, prepare a single document with the following sections:

The user's guide contains the user level documentation and may contain tutorial material (such as extended discussion of examples), but for purposes of this course, tutorial material is optional.

The complete source code of a software product is not usually published, but in this case your project reports should include it. It is required that the code be presented in the literate programming style, using the nuweb tool. The code that you compile and test must be the code that is extracted from the nuweb source file for your project. You should submit your report containing the code and the other sections in both hardcopy form (resulting from running nuweb source file -> nuweb -> LaTeX -> dvips -> laser printer) and as an email message containing only the single nuweb source file.

The case study should be a small example distributed system whose implementation makes nontrivial use of your new distributed software components.

The SGI web pages contain mainly overview and reference material, and some discussion of design issues; they contain only minimal tutorial material and lack any discussion of testing. They point to the code but do not use literate programming in presenting the coding details.

  • User's guide
  • Intended audience
  • Level of discussion
  • Defining terms
  • Tutorial material
  • Reference manual
  • Design issues
  • Source code
  • Case study
  • Other essential steps in preparing your report

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