6.5 What is a "report" anyway?

The "report", which is the sole assessed deliverable of many projects, is often a mixture of technical and process documentation, and of reflection on achievement.

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This bundle reconciles the deliverables of a project with its learning goals, minimising the extra work which students have to undertake purely to make their efforts assessable. It recognises that a project is a learning exercise, not a production effort. It also minimises duplication of material in the deliverables that assessors need to consider.

The way it works is: instead of characterising the outcomes of a project as "a report", they are divided into two, separately delivered, sections:

What the project should have delivered anyway, e.g. plans, records of investigations undertaken (requirements gathering), design documentation (including rationales for the choices made), and so on. A reflective piece giving the student(s) perception of the success (or otherwise) of the work, and demonstrating what has been learnt from the process.

These deliverables are more appropriate, especially to projects with a substantial software engineering focus, and encourage students to discuss what they have done, rather than rehashing general descriptions of approaches (such as lifecycles) that they have adopted.

They encourage students to submit documents describing what they intend to do (as part of plans and risk analyses) rather than a narrative description of what they eventually did.

The more useful aspects of the "report" ? students' reflection on what they have achieved and how ? is still captured (in the reflective piece), but does not now have to be distilled from amongst the narrative description of their software development process.

It works better if the project is not entirely assessed against the final product.

It doesn't work unless there is a consensus among supervisors as to the appropriate deliverables from a project.

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So: ensure that the assessed deliverables of a project match the process which students are expected to employ.