Final Project Guidelines

Your final project is yours to design. You will need to submit a proposal for my approval before beginning the project. The project proposal is due at class time on Wednesday, August 7 and applies to 10 points of the 30-point total. The final writeup for the project is due at 5 pm Friday, August 16, and applies to the other 20 points.

Your project proposal should include a general description of your project and give some initial speculation about these five topics:

• concrete goals for your project, and methods of testing and verification you will apply to determine whether those goals were met
• a discussion of your project's effect on its user population, and the user support issues it might raise
• a discussion of security issues relevant to your project
• a discussion of the work needed to complete the project and what might be needed to maintain it for continued future use, and ways that installation and maintenance tasks can be automated
• documentation of the project, both for the system administration work involved and for your user community

Your final project writeup should then give detailed answers for these five topic areas based on your experience in implementing your project.

Try not to get too ambitious with your final project; pick something you are pretty sure your group can finish in the two weeks you'll have to do it. Your project will be graded on how well you accomplish the goals you set out and how well you address the five major topics listed above, and not on how ambitious or complicated your project is.