Final Products Guidelines

By the end of the semester, which is Friday May 16th at 5pm, your team must complete the following final products:

1. Final Deliverable - A completed tool, model, or document for your client that is accompanied by source code and a user guide that describes in a non-technical way how to utilize the deliverable.
2. Executive Summary - A 1-2 page summary report aimed at a non-technical audience that communicates the essence of your project (ie: goals, steps, results, etc.)
3. Oral Presentation - A 20-minute presentation to the class during our assigned final exam slot (Friday May 16th from 9am-noon). This is not a progress briefing and focus on showcasing your deliverable.
4. Technical Report - A comprehensive, formal report that documents the technical details of your work. You should write this with a technical audience in mind, and it should include specific details on your work (ie: technical details pertaining to models, methods, etc.)

Additionally, you will complete Reflection #3 as an individual by the end of the day on Friday May 16th. You are welcome to complete the reflection earlier, so long as your group has finished your final deliverable and technical report.

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Details

Below are specific details pertaining to the expectations for each final product:

Final Deliverable:

• Your deliverable should be shared with your client no later than 9am on Friday 5/16.
• Feedback from your client will be solicited and taken into consideration when scoring your deliverable.
• Your deliverable must be accompanied by source code and a written user guide. There are no specific requirements for how you package these components, but the code must be sufficient to recreate the deliverable and the user guide should clearly communicate the contents of your deliverable in a manner that a non-technical audience could understand. It may be appropriate to integrate your user guide with your code depending upon the nature of your final deliverable.

Executive Summary:

• This is a concise, 1-2 page, document that provides a non-technical overview of your project.
• It should put your final deliverable into context by clearly describing the aims of your project and how you fulfilled them.
• The executive summary will be given a holistic score based upon its clarity, conciseness, coherence, and completeness.

Oral Presentation:

• Your presentation should focus on the following:
  • Showcasing the contents of your final deliverable to the class
  • Explaining how your deliverable is useful to the client
• While you may use slides to keep your presentation organized, you should devote a substantial amount of time towards showing the deliverable itself (in the same format you gave to your client).
• The target audience for this presentation is our class, so you should be comfortable discussing technical details that were not present in your executive summary.

Technical Report:

• Your report should be a maximum of 15 pages, including any figures, tables, and code or pseudocode.
• Your report should be written for a technical audience, meaning it should thoroughly describe all relevant mathematical and computational details of the methods used in your project.
  • This includes descriptions of models and methods using well-defined notation that is typical of the field.
• Your report should be structured such that it contains the following sections (at minimum):
  • Background
  • Methods
  • Results
• You are encouraged to use subsections within each of the aforementioned sections to better organize the report.
• Your report should include cited references for any external information, methods, libraries, or materials involved in your project. This includes software programs (such as R or Python), libraries/packages (such as lme4 or NLTK), scientific articles, or other online materials.
• Your technical report will be scored according to the following criteria:
  • Completeness (10%) - defined by whether the contents of your report sufficiently describe the background, methods, and results of your project.
  • Formatting (10%) - defined by whether you followed the section structure given in this document, and whether you included figures, tables, and other materials in a consistent and professional manner.
  • Technical Accuracy (45%) - defined by whether your presentation of methods and results provides a sufficient technical detail that is free from erroneous, misleading, and ambiguous statements.
  • Quality of Content (35%) - defined by the report’s coherence, clarity and writing style, and professionalism of graphics, tables, and other visual displays.