General

The Software Engineering 1 Lab reports are submitted using email. This implies, of course, that they must be typed up. However, apart from this, the purpose and content of these reports is similar to reports prepared for any other Laboratory Course. Therefore, before reading these guidelines, make sure that you are familiar with the Undergraduate Laboratory Handbook. That gives guidance for all Laboratory based exercises on your Undergraduate Programme, and outlines the general considerations applying to reporting all laboratory based work. These apply, as far as they are relevant, to the reports for the Software Engineering course also.

The central principle of writing the reports for Software Engineering 1 is that they should explain where your time went during the lab session. If you successfully completed the assigned exercises, this can be relatively straightforward - copies of the file(s) you created or modified, details of the tests you carried out and their results. The difficulty arises where you do not complete the assigned work. In that case, you have to explain, as clearly as you can, what the problems were: whether you simply did not understand the exercise, whether you ran into compiler messages that seemed unintelligible, whether you could not imagine how to test the program, or it worked on some tests and failed others - and so on. The point is that, if you spend three hours in the Lab, you must have done something: so report on what that something was, no matter how far removed it may seem from what was actually requested.