Background and Objectives¶
The Background and Objectives section introduces your reader to the project. It establishes:
what your project is about;
the early work that you did to understand the project topic and any review of existing work that is similar to your project;
the requirements to be addressed during the project;
the process that was used to manage the work.
Background¶
Discuss the topic of your project. What did the project aim to do and what did you do to investigate it?
Look at your project diary to see what work you did early on. What resources did you read and investigate to understand the project and how did they help to define the work that you did? Resources could be books, research papers, online articles, similar software applications or other related work.
Include references to all of those resources in the References section. Your discussion will discuss the different resources and help the reader understand the wider context for your work. As you discuss the different resources, include citations so that a reader can find more information that supports your discussion.
The background may comment on the particular interest you have in the project and why it was something that you wanted to work on.
Analysis¶
Having established the background, write about your analysis of the problem and what that meant for the work that needed to be done. What was the problem to be solved or researched? What did you do to identify and analyse the requirements for the work? Discuss how your analysis was used to decompose the problem into different units of work.
Think about any alternative approaches that you investigated. What that means will vary by the type of project you are working on. It will probably include an assessment of the relevant technologies but it is likely to be wider than that. Issues such as data representation, processing issues and communications protocols are examples of other things that might be relevant.
You are not explaining the solutions in this section because you will discuss that in later sections. Here, you are analysing and decomposing the problem.
Clearly identify the objectives of the work. For an engineering project this is typically as a set of requirements. For a research project this is a statement of the research questions and the requirements for the supporting software you will create. You will evaluate your outcomes against those objectives later in the report. See Requirements for some additional guidance.
In most cases, the agreed objectives or requirements will be the result of a compromise between what would ideally have been produced and what was determined to be possible in the time available. A discussion of the process of arriving at the final list is usually appropriate.
Process¶
Describe the life cycle model or research method that you used. You do not need to write about all of the different process models that you are aware of. Focus on the process model that you have used and why you chose it. It is likely that you needed to adapt an existing process model to suit your project; clearly identify what you used and how you adapted it for your needs.
For the research projects, you will say more about the research method in a separate chapter. Here, you are identifying it and why it was used. Remember to also describe the process for the construction of the software elements you created to support your work.
