CS 5523 Operating Systems
Technical Report Guidelines - Spring 2003

The technical report for the projects in this course should have the following structure.

• Introduction
  • A brief introduction to the subject.
  • A description of the particular problem being addressed - you can paraphrase parts of the laboratory specification, but it must be in your own words
  • A paragraph explaining the motivation for the project - (no, "because it was assigned" is not an acceptable motivation)
  • Definitions of terminology used in the rest of the report
  • A brief description of how the rest of the report is organized.

• Design - an overview of the implementation of the various parts of the project...some diagrams might be nice here.

• Implementation Details - give a more detailed description of the implementation. You might include pseudocode and an indication of the Java classes (or system calls for C) that you used.

• Testing - detailed description of how you tested the program. (No, "I tested the program and it works" is not an acceptable testing section!) The testing section should include:
  • The specific conditions under which the program was tested - which machines, servers, OS, time of day or network conditions if relevant, etc.
  • The types of conditions that you tested for and what the results were
  • Problems that you ran in to and the methods that you used to overcome (not overcome) them
  • Known bugs that your program has

• Conclusions
  • Summary of the overall results of the project.
  • Strengths and weaknesses of your implementation.
  • Problems that you encountered that were not addressed.
  • How this project might be expanded or used in other situations.
  • What you learned and what you are still confused about.

• Bibliography - references that you used. Specify them in a consistent format.