I am collecting here some useful advice for students (both undergraduate and MSc students) doing their individual project with me as supervisor.

This advice is about practical aspects of project work, and especially my preferred methods for ensuring effective interaction between students and supervisor. It must be used in addition to the rules and recommendations set in the appropriate project scheme document for your course. Please READ them and refer to them when you need to. Knowing rules and deadlines is your responsibility.

Meetings

We will need meetings, more frequently at the start and for those projects where I am the client. You must take the initiative for arranging meetings when needed, and ask me some time in advance. A meeting every two weeks is a good basis for planning. I recommend that undergraduates keep this pace of meetings throughout their projects. More frequent meetings may be necessary at the start, or if you are developing work for me (see below). You can also use my office hours during term time for quick unscheduled meetings.

In any case, please keep me informed of your progress on a weekly basis, by sending me short updates every Friday. Remember that you need to spend a large part of your time on your project (for undergraduates, about three days per week, on average): these reports will help you to track how you are spending your time, and to ensure - with my help as well - that you spend it well. A few lines are enough:

Summary of week's activities: .....

Progress against plan: [e.g.: finished X by planned date; late by Y days"

Summary of coming week's activities: ....., [according to plan/ late/early /added to plan ..]

Identified Risks and Issues: [e.g.: delays and how you are going to recover; things that don't work as expected; previously unplanned needs ]

Please attach any electronic documents that you produce as part of your work (or even scan and Email me pencil sketches, if my seeing them helps): I will not read them in detail, except when you have specific questions about them, but it is a low-effort way for you to keep me aware of how your projects are progressing and get some advice. Do NOT prettify scruffy informal notes just to send them to me: this is a waste of time. Instead DO make sure that those documents that are meant to be read in detail are clear and readable and follow the advice written below.

Projects for which I am the main stakeholder: getting requirements right

I expect to see you practically every week, with your notes and sketches of design solutions, at least until the implementation is well under way. Your main risk is NOT that producing what I need may be too difficult, but that you may work very hard to produce what I do not need. Or, as we teach, the most expensive mistakes are not made in coding; they are made in requirements. I have seen too many students ask just enough questions to decide among their preconceived ideas of what I may need, and then disappear and build the wrong thing. They missed the main lesson about requirements: "you always overestimate your understanding of the user's requirements. Remember that the user knows his business, and you are just beginning to understand it". Validation of requirements continues until the day the product is signed off. Only by looking at details as a project develops can a client and a developer really know that they have mutual understanding.

Exchanging documents

I expect to receive many documents from you, from early drafts of e.g. requirement specifications, to the draft project report near the end of your work. I may be supervising, depending on the year, some 15 or 20 students at once. These rules will make it easier to deal with all these documents.

  • make sure that each file you send me has a name that identifies it as yours, and indicates which document it is.
    E.g., a document by me might be called LorenzoDraft_Rep_v01.doc.
    "v01" means version 0.1. This is important because for most documents you will produce more than one version)

  • when you send me a new version of a document, make it easy for me to see what has changed. If you use Word, you can use the "track changes" facility, for instance

  • likewise, if you need feedback about a specific issue, do highlight in your messages to me what this issue is: by saving me time, this will get you much faster feedback

  • give your document footers that contain the page number and the document name, so that both you and I can recognise and reorder the pages when they come out of a printer.

  • those who use Word should use the styles "Heading 1", "Heading 2", etc provided by Word, so that they can get the "outline view" functions and automatic generation of the table of contents.

  • set the page format to A4 (use the "page setup" command; otherwise my printer will rightly object to printing your documents, and you won't have good formatting), and keep reasonably wide margins.

  • check that the document prints OK before you send it to me.

    • Using my feedback on documents

    I will often give you written feedback on a draft document, electronically or on a printout. Note that I will not try to indicate every possible problem, as though I were marking your draft; instead I will flag examples of each kind of problem or defect: it's up to you to take the advice and apply it throughout your document or your work. This is especially the case with problems of style, lack of clarity, grammar (I sometimes highlight errors of English, out of habit, although this is not my role. But you must use good English: it is part of being clear, and communicating clearly is part of professional competence).

    If something I said or wrote is not clear, always feel free to ask questions.

    Rules on proper referencing and on plagiarism

    Please read these rules in the appropriate project scheme document, and make sure they are clear to you before you produce any document. Violating them may have a huge cost (up to expulsion without a degree). These rules are basic customs of professional honesty, so if any student I supervise violates them, even through ignorance, I will take it as a very serious matter.

    It is your responsibiliy to understand the rules and apply them. If anything is not clear after reading all the rules and instructions, don't be afraid to ASK! I am here to answer questions.

    Last, I'll list here useful pointers that I have found or that you signal to me:

    Page maintained by Lorenzo Strigini, l.strigini@csr.city.ac.uk Last updated 1 December 2010