This document provides advice for choosing a project for COMP 4. It notes that managing a complete IT project from start to finish is a unique opportunity, but that such projects are often not fun due to a lack of real-world expectations, underestimating paperwork, feature creep over time, and poor time management rather than technical problems. It recommends choosing a complex project that interests the student and includes advanced algorithms, data structures, classes, mathematics, or technologies like simulations, portable devices, communication protocols, or image processing. The project should address a real problem and have a real end user.

1. Thinking about your project
COMP 4

2. What’s good
• Probably the only chance you’ll ever get to
completely manage an IT project from start to
finish.
• No staff, suppliers, budgets to worry about
• Documentation requirement is thorough, but
quite achievable.
• You can do anything you like*
* as long as it’s complex…..

3. It should be fun, but usually it’s not
• Reasons:
– Project isn’t real (no expectation it will get used)
– Paperwork element isn’t really understood
– Specification ‘creep’
– Time management
• Non-Reasons:
– Technical problems

4. Choosing the right project
• Complexity considerations:
– Non-trivial algorithms, eg: sorting and recursive algorithms.
– Use of sophisticated features of programming language, e.g.
sophisticated data structures, user-defined OOP classes
– Complexity of non-computing field of the problem, e.g. complex
mathematics or complicated data relationships
• And also available
– Time-based simulation
– Portable devices / games consoles
– Communication Protocols, e.g. TCP connections
– Image Processing / pattern recognition, e.g. steganography, use of
regular expressions

5. Choosing the right project
• Real end-user
• Real problem that interests you
• Able to include complex elements
• …. that’s it.