Kinneret Software Engineering Capstone Templates
About the templates
Professor Amir Tomer and Dr. Michael May developed the document templates here as part of the capstone project in software engineering at Kinneret Academic College. The templates were first developed in 2015 and were used until 2022.
Our goal in developing the templates was to introduce uniformity in capstone project documents and ensure that students focus on the technical aspects of the project, not the document formatting. The use of templates forces all students to produce similarly structured and styled reports and avoids errors and omissions caused by forgetfulness.
We provide the templates below in English. Hebrew versions are available upon request. Contact us for details.
People
- Amir Tomer Software Engineering
Kinneret College on the Sea of Galilee - Michael J. May Software Engineering
Kinneret College on the Sea of Galilee
Papers
We presented and published our work on final projects in two papers:
- Michael J. May and Amir Tomer. Improving a Model-Based Software Engineering Capstone Course. Proceedings of IFIP WCCE 2022: World Conference on Computers in Education. pp. 195. August 2022. [pdf] [bib]
- Michael J. May and Amir Tomer. Improving a Model-Based Software Engineering Capstone Course. In Towards a Collaborative Society Through Creative Learning. IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology Series. Springer. October 2023. ISBN 978-3-031-43392-4. To Appear. [doi]
Report Document Templates
Capstone projects at Kinneret are documented using three reports: project charter, design and specification, and final report. Each report begins with the fill-in template provided below. The templates are MS Word documents that the students fill in over the course of the project process.
All project templates are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Project Charter
The Project Charter document is a managerial and planning document. It reflects the original plans for the system and is submitted early in the project lifecycle, after the topic and basic requirements are decided. Once submitted, the document may not be modified. Freezing the document after submission allows a planned versus actual comparison after the project is completed.
Project Specification and Design
The Specification and Design is a technical document. It is designed to be built incrementally or in accordance with the chosen development lifecycle (e.g. as user stories are reached or as modules are designed). To ensure that students keep on track, they must submit a partial version of the document about halfway through the academic year. A final version is submitted at project completion. Unlike the charter, the specification and design must reflect the system as delivered, so it is updated after coding and testing are complete.
Specification and Design template (English)
Project Final Report
The Final Report is a summary and reflective document. It summarizes the project as performed from managerial and technical perspectives. Students write about the problems they faced in execution, what changes were made during the course of the project, and provide an after-the-fact timeline (Gantt). Since most books are written in Hebrew, we require a 2-page project brief in English to make the project results understandable to a wider audience.
Final Report template (English)
Monthly Update Template
To manage student progress and detect personnel issues, each team submits a monthly one-page progress report. The report is signed by the industrial advisor and submitted to the academic advisor.
Monthly Update template (English)
Evaluation Forms
At the end of the project, the students present and defend their project deliverables in front of the academic and industrial advisors. After the defense, the industrial and academic advisors fill in evaluation forms to calculate the final project team grade.
There are two evaluation forms - one for the industrial advisor and one for the academic advisor.