CSC 508 Milestone 1
Background Reading, Group Formation,
and Literature Search
The specific activities are:
To access the 1998 508 requirements specification document, goto the following
directory on kdat or falcon:
~gfisher/projects/alpha/inferno/requirements
This HTML document starts with a table of contents with links to files in the
requirements and specification directories. To start with, read over the
section(s) that relate to project areas that are of potential interest to you,
as presented in Lecture Notes 1.
To access the 205/206 material, goto the following directories on falcon (not kdat):
~gfisher/classes/205There you will find index files to instruct you on how to locate specific material for the classes. Of immediate interest are lectures subdirectories. You need not read all of the 205/206 lectures notes cover-to-cover immediately. We will review some of the 205 material next week in class. Consider the 205/206 notes to be reference material to which we will refer as needed.
~gfisher/classes/206
After you have reviewed the background material, you should determine the project group in which you would like to work, based on the outline of groups at the end of the 508 Lecture Notes Week 1. For choosing project groups, we will try semi-democratically to assign topic areas to persons with appropriate interest and expertise. However, we do need to have all of the important areas covered, so please plan to be flexible if necessary.
NOTE: Project group formation will take place during the first and second
lecture periods of class. At the end of the first period we will take an
initial pass at forming groups. During the Wednesday lecture period of the
second week we will NOT have a normal lecture. Rather we will have our initial
customer interviews to review the work to be done in this quarter's projects.
I will meet with prospective group members in 14-232 (the HP lab) per the
following tentative schedule:
You can "shop around" for a group on Wednesday, but you should have narrowed your selection down to two groups by then.
Group Time Top Level 5:40 - 6:00 Reqmnts and Spec 6:00 - 6:20 GUI and Protoyping 6:20 - 6:40 Design and Imple 6:40 - 7:00 Testing 7:00-7:20 Language 7:20 - 7:40
The specific task for the literature/web search is to find information on the latest tools, languages, and techniques for the project areas. The deliverable for parts c and d of this milestone is a synopsis of the top 5 literature/www sources for your project area. Further details on conducting the literature search follow.
The initial tools to use are the Kennedy library online resources, such as FirstSearch, plus general www search engines. This level of searching will yield a large number of references which will require pruning.
The second search technique is to scan the cumulative indices of the journals listed in the Week 1 Notes, in particular IEEE TSE and ACM TOSEM. In these two journals, the cumulative indices appear in the last issue of each year. In addition to these journals, you should also scan the tables of contents for the yearly conferences, as well as indices for other journals that appear in FirstSearch retrievals.
The library has reasonably complete holdings for the sources listed in the Week 1 Notes. In addition, Fisher has a substantial subset of holdings from these sources.
Our primary focus is on tools, secondary on languages, and tertiary on techniques. Use this as a way to prioritize what papers and articles to pursue in depth.
Probably the most useful narrowing technique is to start with papers from "good" authors, where good means that you recognize the author's name or the author appears to have published extensively in the area. From there, we can use the bibliographies of good-author papers to find further good papers.
In addition, you will use your own good judgment to determine what looks interesting. Read the FirstSearch abstract if it is available, or go to the source to read the abstract. Again, the priorities are tools first, languages second, and general techniques third.