Each team in senior design will keep an up-to-date design notebook. This design notebook will serve as documentation of the entire design process. It should be kept either in electronic format or as a loose-leaf notebook so that pages can be replaced when they need updating. It must be kept up-to-date at all times, reflecting the current state of the project.
On the day of each design review, project notebooks will be turned in to the instructor. They must be completely up-to-date at that point, as they will be used to determine the status of the project at that time.
Each team should have at least one complete notebook. You may want to keep two copies so you'll have one to refer to when the other is turned in to the instructor. The design notebook should be a professional-looking document.
You may choose one of three basic formats:
A single large loose-leaf binder.
An online version, with all information available online. This may include scanned hand-drawn illustrations. Web pages work fine for this. Likewise, Google Docs may be appropriate for this.
Organized and indexed electronic copies of all documents, turned on a single piece of electronic media, such as a CD-ROM.
The design notebook will contain numerous sections relating to the project's design and implementation. Each section has an initial due date - the initial draft of that section must be complete by that time. However, after the initial draft of a section is complete, is should be regularly added to and updated to reflect the current status of the project.
Updates
You will be continually updating the contents of your notebooks. Please follow these guidelines for including updated material.
Mark each page with the date that it is updated.
In each section, put the current document first, followed by the previous version of the document (usually with instructor's comments). Mark the old version as "outdated draft".
Each of the following sections should be separated from the rest by the use of dividers, separate notebooks, or separate web pages.
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Title Page |
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Change requests (ongoing) |
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Current schedule, with updated progress |
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Change requests (ongoing) |
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Software Architecture Document
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Test Results |
Kevin Bolding October 23, 2008
