Avoiding Plagiarism and Coursework Requirements

What is Plagiarism?

Plagiarism is presenting somebody else's work as your own. It includes: copying information directly from the Web or books without referencing the material; submitting joint coursework as an individual effort; copying another student's coursework; stealing coursework from another student and submitting it as your own work. Suspected plagiarism will be  investigated and if found to have occurred will be dealt with according to the procedures set down by the University. Please see your student handbook for further details of what is / isn't plagiarism.

All material copied or amended from any source (e.g. internet, books) must be referenced correctly according to the reference style you are using.

Your work will be submitted for plagiarism checking. Any attempt to bypass our plagiarism detection systems will be treated as a severe Assessment Offence.

Coursework Submission Requirements

• For this coursework you must submit a single PDF document. In general, any text in the document must not be an image (i.e. must not be scanned) and would normally be generated from other documents (e.g. MS Office using "Save As .. PDF"). An exception to this is hand written mathematical notation, but when scanning do ensure the file size is not excessive.
• There are limits on the file size (see the relevant course Moodle page).
• Make sure that any files you upload are virus-free and not protected by a password or corrupted otherwise they will be treated as null submissions.
• Your work will not be printed in colour. Please ensure that any pages with colour are acceptable when printed in Black and White.
• You must NOT submit a paper copy of this coursework.
• All courseworks must be submitted as above. Under no circumstances can they be accepted by academic staff

Part 1: Project planning case study- worth 30%

In this section you are required to work individually to define a set of requirements for the Hospital Sterile Services case (I1). A preliminary design (I2) should follow again as part of your work. I3 is the proposed planning and it is required – you cannot get marks for I1 and I2 without it. You should then create a CoCoMo estimation for the project (I4) and conduct a Social, Legal and Ethical review of the project (I5).

Deliverables from part 1:

I1: Requirements specification (5 marks) – Individual Work

I2: Design work (5 marks) – Individual Work

I3: Proposed planning (A Gantt chart or similar) – you must do this to get marks for I1 & I2

I4: CoCoMo (10 marks) – Individual Work

I5: Social, Legal and Ethical review of the project (10 marks) – Individual Work

The Case Study: Hospital Sterile Services

The sterile services department of a large hospital manages the cleaning and sterilisation of surgical and other medical instruments used at various medical procedures such as medical operations in the hospital. Surgical instrument are organised in trays, each identified by a unique identification number. A medical procedure will typically use one or more of trays of surgical instruments. The tray id is recorded in the procedure notes, so that the history of any instruments used can be traced at any time in the future and cross-referenced to individual patients and medical personnel. Each procedure type requires a prescribed number of trays, each with a predetermined list of contents, specific for this type of operation.

Types of Plagiarism

After a procedure, some or all of the instruments used may need to be disposed of. Any individual instruments disposed of are replaced by brand new ones. The trays are then loaded on trolleys and taken through a series of cleansing and sterilisation procedures. Typically, each tray is washed to remove any organic matter and then put through a series of operations to sterilise them. The series of required sterilisation operations depend on the tray instrument list type. For each sterilisation operation, the operator name, sterilisation machine identification, date and time need to be recorded. Your software consultancy company has been approached to automate the current process that is largely paper based. The aim is to create a software system that can automate the process and allow integration with other hospital information systems.

You are required to model the current business system and propose a new, integrated software system that will include all current functionality and enhancements needed.

Your job is to elicit the exact requirements from the case study. Any clarifications that you need to make will be done in questions and answer sessions with your client (your lecturer) during class. You can make further assumptions, as well. However, you will (as good software engineers) record any conclusions and assumptions you make from these discussions to be included in your final documentation/report appendix.

Part 2: Management report for the production of an academic essay – worth 30%

For this task you are required to perform some management for the production of a quality assurance on your essay part 3. You should document as a detailed section in your coursework how you will  ensure both process and product quality, time management using project planning techniques and risk assessment. You should also include review of your plan once the work is complete.

This part your coursework should include the following:

1. A description of your process and product quality assurance procedure for your coursework. This should include a description of any change control that you have employed.
2. A review of your quality assurance procedures.

Deliverables from part 2:

I6: QA plan with commercial risk assessment (10 marks) and time management (30 marks) Your QA plan should guide your production of Part 3

Part 3: Academic essay – worth 40%

You are to submit an academic style paper.

In his seminal paper “No Silver Bullet – Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering1 ” Fred

Brooks Jr. questioned whether there could be a “silver bullet” that could lay to rest the monsters of missed schedules, blown budgets and flawed products. He argued that software development is ultimately reliant on good designers and good managers and so advances in technology and methodology such as object-orientated analysis and design or programming languages can never give more than marginal gains. He concluded that “Building software will always be hard. There is inherently no silver bullet.”

However, that paper was written nearly thirty years ago and in that time there have been a number of advances which claim to specifically address the problems of large scale systems development. You are to research and prepare a report on one of these techniques from the following list:

• TOGAF,
• Extreme Programming.

Your report should be an academic style discussion that critically evaluates the technique’s value in light of software engineering’s inherent problems and concludes by discussing how far the technology does, or does not, go toward supporting the view expressed by Brooks in the quotation given above. The report should have solid academic content and you should therefore base your discussion on at least one refereed paper from a leading computing or software engineering journal such as IEEE Software, IEEE Computing or Communications of the ACM.

Definitions

This is a level seven degree coursework and therefore, as well as a demonstrating that you have learnt some facts or skills, you are being assessed on your ability to research, think and reason and then articulate your findings and conclusions.

You will be assessed on the following points:

Knowledge & Comprehension:

• A clear demonstration of background reading and research into the issues discussed.
• A demonstration of your understanding of the field, i.e. clearly identifying and enumerating the fundamental issues, use of correct terminology and facts including knowledge of the existence and names of methods, classifications, abstractions, generalizations and theories.
• Discussion summarizing the topic area and ability to extrapolate beyond the given situation.
• Can explain or summarize information giving a good account of work done by others and reporting ideas intelligibly with accuracy and thoroughness and without introducing gross distortions Analysis, Application & Synthesis
• Able to apply abstractions in particular and concrete situations, e.g. use of examples to illustrate and support your argument.
• General organizational structures can be identified
• Assumptions can be recognized.
• Can produce sensible, reasoned and substantiated criticism and suggest alternatives
• Does not indulge in pointless and unsubstantiated criticism
• Able to combine elements or parts in such a way as to produce a pattern or structure that was not clearly there before

Evaluation / critique

• Demonstration of insight
• A strong argument supporting or rejecting the technique with a sound conclusion given your stated premises.
• Can make qualitative and quantitative judgments about the value of methods, processes or artefacts.