Custom Essay

The Specification:
Expressed as Project Aims.
A statement of what the project is about including any necessary changes to the original proposal or based on new information or understanding. A summary of the research and analysis carried out thus far should also be included.
This should include:
Who the project is being done for?
What the problems and needs of the sponsor are?
What are the project’s aims?
What is the proposed solution?
What will be produced in the project?
Any major modifications to the original proposal

Literature Survey:
This should expand upon what was presented in the proposal and should discuss existing knowledge in the field and the prior knowledge upon which the project is based. It does not have to be as detailed as the literature survey in the final dissertation report, yet it should prove that research has been done and that reading was done on the subject.

Conduct of the Project:
Proposes how the project will be carried out and should include, where appropriate:
Background research: what information will be used to understand the problem and its solution?
Data required: what data will be needed for the project and from where it will be obtained;
Any new skills that will be required and how these will be acquired;
The design methods to be used;
The software to be used

The Design:
Outline of the project design, according to a standard method. Although designs will vary according to the needs of particular projects, a typical design of a software implementation will comprise:
A description of the anticipated components of the system and how they are to be organized;
In case there is a need for a commissioned work (such as a hardware device or a service routine) it must be specified in this report and justified, otherwise it could be treated as collusion;
A description of data structures to be used by the system;
Algorithms to manipulate these data structures; and
A design of the intended interface
For example, if following an object-oriented design method, one might include: case diagrams; an interaction chart; the objects to be used in the system; attributes and methods of objects; pseudo-code for the key methods; an interface design.

In this section one might include: data flow diagrams; entity relationship diagrams; entity life histories; pseudo code for the key processes; interface design.

For a project involving the empirical investigation of some hypothesis one would normally expect to see things such as: a statement of the hypotheses to be tested; a description of the test data to be used; an experiment design, the experiments to be performed; any controls to be used; a description of how the results will be analyzed, including any statistical techniques that will be used; anticipated conclusions; program designs for any software that needs to be developed to generate the test data or conduct the experiments.
The important thing is that the report clearly shows that a design method has been followed, and that the design has been carried out with sufficient attention to detail as to inspire confidence that it can be realized, tested, and evaluated in the time remaining for the project.

Statement of Deliverables:
This states what will be produced by the project. It serves as an amendment to the Deliverables section in the proposal. In some cases it may be useful to identify some deliverables as essential and others as desirable. As appropriate, this will include:
A description of anticipated documentation content;
A description of anticipated software;
A description of anticipated experiments;
A description of methods for evaluation of the work