ProgrammingProjectDocumentationReportWriting.doc

Programming Project : Documentation Report Writing §4.0 Introduction §4.3 The Report Itself §4.1 Presentation Style §4.4 Reports - Concluding Comments §4.2 Report Overview ? §4.0 Introduction Final element of software development strategy was Presentation - including relevant report Remember - reports are a vital part of whole process of software development! Reports matter in university, for assessment in research and development, for dissemination of ideas in systems development for your boss to convince their boss of your worth to lower subsequent maintenance costs Reports should be shorter rather than longer, but the shorter they are (if complete!) the longer they take to write e.g. 3 weeks for 50 pages of final honours report! Specific tip for report writing keep systematic note of all design decisions, however trivial (later, this will in any case be a required part of professional practice) subsequently, delete those decisions still obvious rewrite the others in a suitable, cursive style ? §4.1 Presentation Style As with programs, read all the good examples you can find University reports are hard to find, so try (for style as well as content) Journal of the A.C.M ([American] Association for Computing Machinery) IEEE Software ([American] Institution of Electronic Electrical Engineers) Literary Style? anything you can write succinctly need not now be written in third person, past tense, passive voice the program was written ... But your reports - all reports - must be typed be grammatical have correct spelling No educated person will have any sympathy with the following, all-too-common errors misused apostrophes - they should be used with nouns, to show possession more generally, for ellipsis misuse of its and its or of the variations of theyre, their, there its of it its it is or it was theyre they are or they were their of them there place, or,well, as in there is (whose and whos are