Deliverable: Report or Dissertation
The final report or dissertation forms a major part of your final mark, and a poor report can undo a lot of otherwise good technical work. The report should show that you understand your work, show where the design and work went, and convince the markers that it is important and valuable. It should critically reflect on the project and what was achieved. It should be submitted in PDF format to the Final Submission - Report slot. Note that this is routed via Turnitin, which imposes a 40MB limit.
Reports should be understandable to any CS staff–not all markers will be specialists in all fields. Sending a draft to your supervisor for comments is very important and the more time you leave for this, the better the result is likely to be.
There are examples of past reports in the project library in the student handbook and it is good to study them, as well as looking at the report guidance linked below.
A good report will be well-structured, clear and informative, demonstrate understanding of the topic and related work, and not be overly verbose. Talk to your supervisor for tips and feedback.
The final project report will normally take the following form, although this may be varied if you and your supervisor feel it appropriate. It is always a good idea to produce an early outline of the structure and discuss this with your supervisor before writing large parts of the report. Keep in mind when reading reports from previous years that these guidelines may have changed over time.
| Section | Content |
|---|---|
| Title page | Containing the title of the project, your name, student ID, “University of St Andrews”, the title of your degree programme, and the date of submission. You may add the name of your supervisor if you wish. |
| Abstract | Outline of the project using at most 250 words. |
| Declaration | “I hereby certify that this dissertation, which is approximately [insert word count] words in length, has been composed by me, that it is the record of work carried out by me and that it has not been submitted in any previous application for a degree. This project was conducted by me at the University of St Andrews from [insert month/year] to [insert month/year] towards fulfilment of the requirements of the University of St Andrews for the degree of [insert degree title] under the supervision of [insert name]. In submitting this project report to the University of St Andrews, I give permission for it to be published online. I retain the copyright in this work.” If applicable, include declaration on use of generative AI tools. [insert date] [insert signature] If there is a strong case for the protection of confidential data, the parts of the declaration giving permission for its publication may be omitted by prior permission of the Projects Coordinator. |
| Contents page | Table of contents. |
| Introduction | Describe the problem you set out to solve and the extent of your success in solving it. You should include the aims and objectives of the project in order of importance and try to outline key aspects of your project for the reader to look for in the rest of your report. |
| Context survey | Surveying the context, the background literature and any recent work with similar aims. The context survey describes the work already done in this area, either as described in textbooks, research papers, or in publicly available software. You may also describe potentially useful tools and technologies here but do not go into project-specific decisions. |
| Requirements specification | Capturing the properties the software solution must have in the form of requirements specification. You may wish to specify different types of requirements and given them priorities if applicable. |
| Software engineering process | The development approach taken and justification for its adoption. |
| Ethics | Any ethical considerations for the project. Your initial ethics form, and full ethics ‘favourable opinion’ letter if applicable, should be included as an appendix. |
| Design | Indicating the structure of the system, with particular focus on main ideas of the design, unusual design features, etc. |
| Implementation | How the implementation was done and tested, with particular focus on important / novel algorithms and/or data structures, unusual implementation decisions, novel user interface features, etc. |
| Evaluation and critical appraisal | You should evaluate your own work with respect to your original objectives. You should also critically evaluate your work with respect to related work done by others. You should compare and contrast the project to similar work in the public domain, for example as written about in published papers, or as distributed in software available to you. |
| Conclusions | You should summarise your project, emphasising your key achievements and significant drawbacks to your work, and discuss future directions your work could be taken in. |
| Appendix: testing summary | This should describe the steps taken to debug, test, verify or otherwise confirm the correctness of the various modules and their combination. |
| Appendix: user manual | Instructions on installing, executing and using the system where appropriate. |
| Optional: further appendices | If appropriate, you may include other material in appendices which are not suitable for inclusion in the main body of your report, such as mathematical proofs. |
Appendices should be used for material that documents your work, is relevant, but does not need to be in the main body of the report. The main body should stand on its own. You should not include software listings in your project report, unless it is appropriate to discuss small sections in the main body of your report. Code and associated material will be submitted separately to MMS.