Senior Projects

Read the Senior Project Policy carefully.

The template for the meeting report is supposed to be submitted to the project supervisors every week with the signatures of all team members.

Description

The Senior Project is intended to be a capstone experience that draws on the previous three years of course work.  The Senior Project should therefore be sufficient in scope and technical content in order to expose students’ technical competence developed during their education at Izmir University of Economics. The Project’s specific topic can be in any field of computer engineering, software engineering, industrial engineering or similar areas. It is also expected that the project be carried out by a team of 2-5 senior students under the supervision of related faculty member(s). The project’s duration is expected to run over 2 semesters and separately graded at the end of each semester.

Agreement

Announcements are made at the beginning of the Fall semester regarding the Senior Projects. Students are responsible for finding a project advisor within the first two weeks of the Fall semester. The students are encouraged to talk to faculty about potential topics for senior projects announced or proposed by the students. When agreement is reached for a project, it is highly recommended that the project be documented at this stage with at least a brief vision statement that captures the stakeholders’ understanding of the project.

The Role of the Advisor

The role of the advisor is to advise, guide and direct the student in a properly and timely manner. Students should consult regularly at least bi-weekly with their advisor, well in advance of deadlines, to get advice and feedback about the content and quality of deliverables.

Project Milestones

A typical Senior Project will consist of several stages as described below. At the end of each phase, the students are supposed to document their work and hand out the deliverables to their advisor on time for review and feedback.

Proposal

At this initial phase, the students are required to formulate a problem statement which is a document containing the description of the problem, the scenarios in which the problem may occur, and their proposed solution to the problem. An emphasis is placed on the problem and its solution, not on the technologies that may be used to address the solution. At the end of this phase, the following objectives must be reached:

• The stakeholders (student(s), advisor(s), customers or user if any) must agree on the purpose and scope of the project;

• A vision of the project solution or output should be clearly stated;

• The stakeholders must agree on the criteria defining the success of the project;

All above objectives must be fully documented.

Background Research

At this stage students are required to complete a background research on the project. This will include a literature survey, studies in industry or subject area, and different approaches to the problem on hand, where ever applicable. It is recommended that the students meet frequently with their advisor for guidance.

Requirements Specification

The students are expected to come up with a plan to solve the problem providing a high level description of the “system” and reaching the objectives of the project.

At the end of this phase, the following objectives must be reached:

• Functional and nonfunctional requirements;

• Required outcomes and expectations;

• Project constraints and limitations;

• Proposed Methodology;

System Design

System design is a process of problem-solving and planning leading to a solution for the project. By the end of system design phase, a detailed low level design of a feasible solution to the problem must be completed. This may include but not restricted to:

• Rationale for the proposed solution;

• Model development;

• All identified risks eliminated or covered by a contingency plan;

Verification and Validation

At verification and validation (or testing) phase, students are expected to prepare a plan that would provide stakeholders with information about the quality of the project’s output or service under test , with respect to the context in which it is intended to operate. This includes, but not limited to, the process of executing a program or application with the intent of finding software bugs or modeling deficiencies.

A primary objective for testing is to detect project failures so that defects may be uncovered and corrected.

Implementation

At the implementation phase, the students begin to implement the project, showing end-to-end functionality.  At the end of this phase, the following objectives must be reached:

• The implementation should show explicitly prove the developed model is operational and functional;

• All the proposed features or objectives must be implemented;

• The implementation must be robust;

An independent third party must be able to install, verify/test, and use the output of the project.

Delivery

At this phase, the project team complete, finalize the documents, and participate in the senior project presentations. At the end of this phase, the following objectives must be reached:

• A group of a similar team of competent engineers re-implement the output with only the documentation as guidance;

• The satisfaction of the criteria of success identified at the project proposal.

Oral Presentation

The team is to prepare a presentation at the end of each semester including appropriate slides and handouts. The purpose of this presentation is to defend the project and its output. The presentation is to describe and discuss why each of the critical decisions was made and how it was made. The presentation should describe also the deliverables and the important functionalities of the project. All the documents and materials must be handed out to all the members of the Examination Committee at the last Friday of the classes.

Senior Project Development Schedule

At the end of each semester, there will be a 15-20 minute oral presentation in front of their Examination Committee. Students will get their grading according to the grading policy given below.

1st semester

• Week 2  Project selection and team formation

• Week 4  Project proposal submission

• Week 8  Background research and requirements specification document submission

• Week 14 System design document submission

• Week 15  Oral presentation

2nd semester

• Week 10        Testing (validation and verification) document submission

• Week 14         Implementation document submission

• Week 15         Delivery and oral presentation

Grading Policy

1st semester

• 10%               Homework

• 20%               Presentation

• 25%                Participation

• 45%                Project

2nd semester

• 30%                Implementation document

• 10%                Testing (validation and verification) document

• 30%                Final documents and software/product of the project

• 30%                Oral presentation

The template for the meeting report is available here. (Computer Engineering and Software Engineering)
The template for the senior project report is available here. (Computer Engineering and Software Engineering)
Project assignments are here. (Computer Engineering and Software Engineering)