Project Proposal
Project Proposal Outline
Heading
- Descriptive Title for the Project
- Pick a title that will be meaningful on your resume
- Team Name
- Your choice: pick something fun or something professional or both
- Team Name for Github
- To be assigned, as teams are formed
- Team under class organization will be created
- Members of the team added to it
- Team repository (of the same name as the team) will be created
- Team Members
Introduction
- Overview
- What is the project?
- What is the motivation for the project?
- Place your project in the context of the market
- Is your project idea novel? If so, what need does it fill?
- If not novel, what existing software does it resemble? How is it different?
- What are the backgrounds of the team members?
- Is there anything you’d like to include to orient the reader?
Customer Value
- Customer Need
- Who is the primary customer?
- What does the customer want?
- Why? What is their underlying problem to solve or experience to have?
- Place your software in the context of the market.
- Proposed Solution
- From the customer’s POV, what will your solution deliver?
- How will the customer benefit from your proposed solution?
- Does it provide a new capability or is it much better, easier, faster …?
- Have you tested the idea on anyone?
- Measures of Success
- How will you know if customers got the benefits you want to provide?
- What are your customer-centric measures of success?
Technology
- System: technology you deliver
- From the developer’s POV, what will your software do?
- What are the main components of your system? What do they do?
- What is a high-level block diagram of the architecture of the system?
- What is a minimal system that would have some value to the customer?
- What are some possible enhancements that customers would value?
- How will you test your system?
- Tools: technology you use to build what you deliver
- What will you use to build the system?
- Are there available tools you can leverage?
Team
- Skills
- Has anyone on the team built something like this before?
- Are the tools known or new to the team?
- Roles
- What are the roles of the team members?
- Will the roles be fixed or rotating?
Project Management
- Schedule
- Is completion of the system feasible?
- When and how often will you meet? Face to face?
- Write a (tentative) week-by-week schedule for project tasks and deadlines
- Constraints
- Are there any regulatory, or legal constraints?
- Are there any ethical or social concerns?
- Resources
- Will you have access to the data you need?
- Descoping
- What will happen if the full functionality can not be implemented
- Will the reduced functionality operate?
- Will it be useful (at least partially solving the problem)?
