Guidelines for Supervision of Projects

Prepared by
Prof. Asoka S. Karunananda

Degree of Bachelor of Information Technology (External)

Faculty of Information Technology
University of Moratuwa

1. Introduction
ITE 3999 has been introduced as a software development project, which provides training
for students to conduct a project by going through major steps in a software development
project. In addition, students will gain skills to formulate a project, write a project
proposal, write an interim report, write the final thesis and do a presentation. ITE 3999
has been introduced as a supervised project. It is expected of the respective supervisors to
guide students from the project formulation to appear for the viva-voce examination.
In order to maintain uniformity among supervision, Faculty of Information Technology,
has devised a set of guidelines for supervisors. These guidelines can be used as a generic
framework not only for supervision, but also for conduct of the research, developing
proposals, reports, final thesis and also in doing the presentation at viva-voce
examination. In fact, the card for recording the student progress has been designed inline
with the guidelines prepared for supervisions.
2. General Points
In order to maintain the standard of the project, the following aspects are given due
consideration by the Faculty.

A supervisor for ITE 3999 should have conducted a supervised project for his/her
first degree/postgraduate degree. CV of the supervisor should indicate that he/she
has done a project (Name of the project and the Name of the Supervisor).

Supervisor is expected to guide the student on the preparation of the project

proposal. Students are encouraged to find the supervisors on their own and to
develop the project proposal through their guidance.

University has given the students guidelines for Proposals, Interim Reports, Final
Thesis and Presentations. Supervisors also have access to those resources and
adhere to these guidelines during supervision.

Upon the completion of the proposal, students are asked to submit the proposal
together with the CV of the supervisor.

Both the proposal and the supervisor should be approved by the Faculty before
commencing the project.

Supervisors should be willing to participate in person, in three occasions at a

place informed by the CODL.

Briefing session for supervisors

Interim Evaluation
Final Evaluation

Supervisors should be ready meet students once every fortnight and record the
progress in the progress monitoring card provided. This will be audited by the

university from time to time. The properly maintained card is also used as a
component of evaluation.

The steps indicated in the progress monitoring card should be used as the
guideline for supervision of the project.

Supervisors are expected to go through Project Proposals, Interim Reports and

Final Thesis before submitting those to the university. These reports require your
signature.

Supervisors presence at the interim evaluation and final evaluation is essential

for the evaluation purpose.

3. Failing at the Interim evaluation

Interim report and the presentation decide the eligibility to continue with the project.
Criteria for interim evaluation is given in the document called Introduction to Final Year
Projects. If a student fails the interim evaluation, he will not be eligible to continue the
project, and will receive an F grade. Thus he should start a new project by submitting a
fresh proposal with the next batch.
4. Failing at the final evaluation
If a student obtains eligibility to continue with the project and fails at the final evaluation,
he/she will receive an I grade provided that he can do some minor improvements and do a
resubmission in one/two months. In this instance, the student will be given a maximum
of C grade.
If the final evaluation decides that improvements cannot be done in one/two months, the
student receives an F grade, and is required to repeat ITE 3999 with the next batch by
submitting a fresh project proposal. Such a student receives maximum of C grade.
5. Repeating ITE 3999
There are two types of repeat students as follows and receive maximum of grade C after
repeating with the next batch.
(a) A student who was not eligible to continue the project
(b) A student who fails at the final evaluation requiring major improvements

6. Guidelines for Supervision

Please note that all guidelines for preparation of documents and presentation are provided
to students. Therefore, please advise the students that they should adhere to those
guidelines. Please note that those guidelines use very generic terms such as Others work,
Approach, Design, etc. and you are required to guide students to find suitable terms for
these as per their own projects.

The following are some specific guidelines for the supervisors. These guidelines will be
useful for progress monitoring as well as guiding the students to produce various write
ups at different stages.
Development of the proposal
For the project that you intend to supervise, please make sure that the problem is worth
addressing, and that the technology to be used also has a reasonable challenge. In
addition, look into the resource requirements and feasibility of activity schedule in the
proposal. Since this is the very first report in the process, please check whether students
correctly use all citations, reference, etc. as per the guideleines for preparation of project
proposals.
Problem and Solution
Ask the student to rephrase many times the problem he/she addresses and the solution
he/she intends to devise. Many students mix up problem and the solution. For, instance,
when you ask, what is the problem you address in the project, the student might say that I
am going to develop an MIS for certain company. Please explain him/her that developing
MIS is a solution, but not the problem. Perhaps MIS would be the solution for the
problem of inefficiency of manual document processing at the company.
Setting Aim and Objectives
Please explain that there is one aim in a project. It can be worded as I want to solve
<problem> by developing <solution> with the use of <technology>. In contrast, train the
students to phrase the objectives, with reference to problem, technology, solution,
evaluation and documentation. For example, first objective would be to do a critical
review of the state of the art of ERP solutions.
Literature Review
Please make sure that students do not just report, but provide a critical review of others
work. As such both good points and limitations must be reviewed by the students. More
importantly, make sure that they do not copy from the original source, yet produce their
own write ups, with reference and citations. Make sure that all entries included in the list
of reference are cited inside the text. All figures and tables must also be cited and
described inside the body of the text.
Finally, make sure that at the end of the review of others work, a student should clearly
identify the problem to be addressed and the technology to be used to solve the problem.
Technology adapted
Here please check whether the students have identified the technology to be used with a
justification of why the particular technology has been used. This study must be done by
keeping the problem in mind. Please do not allow students to just report on technologies
without relating to those with the problem at hand.

Approach
Please check whether students are clear about users, inputs, outputs, processes, features
and technology as per the approach. It would be easier to trace the students position
about the approach by monitoring their progress on these dimensions. The concept of
approach differentiates between two projects that address the same problem still using the
same technology.
The elements in the approach (users, inputs, outputs, process, features and technology)
can be questioned when a project progresses slowly. This in return will help locate where
the issue is.
Analysis and Design
This is a well known step in all software development projects. Based on the analysis,
students should be able to develop a top level architecture for the solution with various
modules. The design must have a diagram. Please check whether the students have
described the modules in the design diagram in terms of WHAT each module does.
Advise the students to send the detailed diagrams (class, activity, sequence, etc.) to an
appendix.
It would be easy for you to monitor the progress as per the modules in the design
diagram. At each meeting check how far they have worked on each module.
Implementation
This is yet another description about the design diagrams, in terms of HOW each module
should be implemented. For this purpose, please check whether students have identified
algorithms, pseudo codes, software, hardware, etc. to implement the role of each module.
Advise them to justify the choice of such sources for respective modules.
Evaluation
Students tend to neglect this topic. Please advise them about the importance of testing or
evaluation in all scientific projects. You may guide the students to organize the
evaluation in terms of evaluation strategy (how to test), identification of participants,
controlling the experiments, interviewing people, design of questionnaire and reporting
the results. Please make sure that evaluation has been structured to measure the
objectives.
Conclusion
This is very crucial in all projects. Please advise the students to provide an overall
conclusion, which is quantitative. Then carefully question to see whether students have
achieved each objective. Check whether students have listed too much further work.