Appendices¶
The Project Report can include an Appendices. An Appendices is a collection of extra chapters that contain supporting material for the project.
An Appendices consists of one or more chapters, each of which is known as an Appendix. These are labelled as Appendix A, Appendix B, and so on. Within each Appendix, you will include sections just as you would with any of your chapters in the body of the report.
In the templates available for the Project Report, you will see one appendix.
Appendix A: Use of Third-Party Code, Libraries and Generative AI
Example reports from previous years have included other appendices, but we have found that students have not used them well. You must include Appendix A. You might include other appendices, but you should only include if they are useful. If you aren’t sure, speak to your supervisor or the module coordinator.
Use of Third-Party Code, Libraries and Generative AI¶
This appendix is required for all projects. It is your statement about any use of 3rd party code and libraries, as well as the use of Generative aI.
Third-party code and libraries refers to any code or library that is written by another entity (person or organisation). In this Appendix, you explain if you have made use of work produced by others. You also need to make it clear if you have used the code or library as it was provided or if you have made changes. Make sure you state the license that covers the work from other people.
For example, if a .NET project might have used the Serilog library for generating formatted log infomration. If that has been used, an appropriate statement would be:
The Serilog [X] library was used to generate log messages. This was used to provide the default logging mechanism for this project. It was included as a nuget package. The software was used without modification. The library is used under the Apache 2.0 license.
The [X] represents a citation. Include a reference to the home page of the project in the same way as other references.
On Blackboard, there is the document about how to report any use of Generative AI. Read that document and follow its guidance.
Other appendices¶
Include other appendices as necessary. You aren’t required to include other appendices, and most reports won’t need to include more appendices.
Before including information in the appendices, consider if it is better to submit the supporting evidence with the technical work. For examples such at the following, it would be better to include them in your technical submission instead of including them as an appendix:
If you have developed a Design Specification document as part of a plan-driven approach for the project, then it would be appropriate to include that document in the technical work. In this report, you would highlight the most interesting aspects of the design, referring your reader to the full specification for further detail.
If you have taken an agile approach to developing the project, then you may be less likely to have developed a full requirements specification at the start of the project. Perhaps you used stories to keep track of the functionality and the ‘future conversations.’ If it isn’t relevant to include all those stories in the body of your report, you could detail those stores in a document in the technical work.
If you have used manual testing, then include a document in the technical work that records the tests that have been done. In this report, you would talk about the use of those tests.
If you have completed a User Evaluation as part of your work, the raw results of your evaluation would be appropriate in a document in the technical work. The analysis of the evaluation can be discussed in this report.
Supporting evidence¶
Documents included in the technical work or in the appendices are supporting evidence of the work done. Where you include documents, the Project Report should refer to the documents. You should not be relying on detailed study of those documents in order to understand what is written in this report.
Avoid having your reader needing to continually move between the body of the report and the information in the Appendices. The reader will be most interested in the details that you include in the body of the report. These appendices are a place where your reader can find more information if necessary.
Note
in recent years, some people have been submitted lots of information in the appendices and not handled that information appropriately. There are some instances where most of the report appears to be in the appendices and markers cannot make sense of the work without first reading the appendices in detail.
That is not the intention of the appendices. We will discuss this in the seminar later in the semester. The guidance in this section is likely to be clarified to help you use appendecies appropriately. We will let you know when any changes are made to this guidance.
