One purpose of Senior Design is to allow you to experience a capstone project with many open-ended design options. To evaluate your design experience, we are requiring students to prepare an individual retrospective analysis of their design experience in CS4911.
The format for this analysis should follow this outline:
Name
Team Name
Introduction
Brief description of the system you built this semester.
Design Issues
What were the issues and constraints that this project imposed on your design? What tradeoffs did you have to make in completing the design? For instance a customer wants both extensibility and security. How did you trade off between those? Issues refer usually to non-functional type requirements: extensibility, portability, ease of use, reliability, performance, etc.
Alternative Solutions
What were the alternative designs that you considered (this may include designs you thought about, but that were rejected by you before even proposing them to the team)? Why were these alternative solutions not chosen? In hindsight, was there an alternative design that would have been better than the one chosen and implemented.
Design Rationale
From your standpoint as an individual team member, what were the guiding
principles or constraints that led you to adopt the design you did? What decisions about the design did you make
in order to address the issues and alternative solutions identified in the previous section?
Traceability
Discuss briefly how the use cases map to the conceptual architecture, and how the detailed design maps to the conceptual architecture Finally discuss how the code maps to the detailed design.
Validation
How did you validate your design? How did you ensure that the design you came up with satisfied the customer requirements and would result in the system the customer wanted? This is how you validated design – not how you validated the implementation or the requirements. Checking with the customer is NOT validating your design.
Assessment and Reflection
This section is about the design and not about
the design process. Think about what worked and what didn't work. What would
you have done differently if you knew at the start what you knew at the end. Be sure to
address the why! This the most important
section of the document.
Design Process
Your team followed some process that resulted in the final design. In hindsight, how well did that process work? Were there other things that should have been done to improve the design?