Project report #4
As with reports #2 & #3, the content of your intermediate reports will depend on your selected development methodology and on the milestones you laid out in your project plan (including any updates you have made to it). Remember that their purpose is to provide visibility to the client and demonstrate whether or not your project is on track. To that extent, these reports should always address the status of any milestones whose target dates have passed and include updates to the project plan (especially schedule and risk) if changes are required. They should also include or account for any deliverables ready by the report deadline (including summaries and takeaways from client demos). For heavyweight methodologies, these reports may be a natural place to request client approval of gating deliverables (be sure to request such approval explicitly in separate communication with your client).
Here are some additional recommended elements to include in your fourth report for methodologies commonly used by CS 5150 projects:
- Modified waterfall
- Evidence of completion of the majority of implementation (including testing progress)
- Iterative refinement
- Final refinements to requirements and design, demo of final prototype, plan for implementing production-ready version
- Agile
- Products of second sprint (production-ready code & documentation), evaluation of second sprint (slipped tasks, discovered work, velocity), final sprint plan
Additionally, your fourth report must document the state of testing in your project. This documentation should include:
- Your test plan. After reading your test plan, your client should understand:
- What styles and scopes of tests will cover your changes, and how thoroughly you aim for your changes to be covered
- The extent to which tests may be automated, as well as any infrastructure requirements for “large” tests
- Where implementing and conducting tests fall in the project’s schedule (hint: “at the very end” is not recommended)
- A summary of the current state of testing in the pre-existing system you are enhancing; for automatable tests, report a coverage metric
- Preliminary results from user testing your UI changes (you did include user testing in your test plan, right?)