Approaches to writing Writing and structuring reports

8.2 Writing and structuring reports 189 n Appendices – labelled as Appendix A, Appendix B, Appendix C, etc. These may include program listings, test results, questionnaire results, interviews you have tran- scribed, extracts from manuals, letterscorrespondence you have received and project details such as your initial proposal, your project plan and other project management documentation and meeting reports. You may also include a user manual and instal- lation guide and perhaps extracts or examples of data or data sets used. Consult with your supervisor over what should and what should not be included in the appendices of your report. n Glossary of terms – if required. n Index – if required – but avoid if possible. Following is a typical structure that many of my undergraduate students use for projects that have involved the development of a software system: n Abstract n Acknowledgements n Contents listing n Chapter 1 – Introduction n Chapter 2 – Literature review n Chapter 3 – Requirements n Chapter 4 – Design n Chapter 5 – Implementation and test n Chapter 6 – Evaluation n Chapter 7 – Conclusions n References n Appendices Figure 8.2 provides an indication of how the chapters in this kind of report struc- ture relate to one another those of you familiar with software engineering may recognise this as an adaptation of the v-process model. For example, the Conclusions chapter evaluates the project overall – how well it achieves its aims and objectives outlined in the Introduction and how it fits in and supports existing work in the Figure 8.2 The relationships between chapters 190 Chapter 8 n Presenting your project in written form field covered in the Literature review; the Evaluation of the software chapter appraises the system developed with the original requirements and evaluates whether those requirements were appropriate; the Implementation chapter discusses how the software was implemented and how the implementation follows the design presented in the previous chapter. Sometimes students will swap over Chapters 2 and 3 Literature review and Requirements to provide the reader with more information about what the project is about before setting it in a wider context. Another variation is to combine Chapters 4 and 5 into a Design and Implementation chapter and move all testing of the software, including test plans and so on and evaluation into Chapter 6. Chapter 6 Evaluation covers the evaluation of the product developed – i.e., what the usersclient think of the system, how it compares with other systems, how it matches the requirements, and so on. The final chapter Conclusion presents an evaluation of the project – it summarises what the project has achieved what has been its contribution and how the project has met its initial aims and objectives and if not, it explains why. How does this project fit into and enhance existing work in the field? This chapter also covers a number of other issues. For example, was the development process model used appropriate if not, why not and what else should have been used?? Was the programming language suitable? What problems did you face and how did you overcome them? What would you do next if you had more time? If you were to do the project again, what would you do dif- ferently? What have you learnt and experienced from doing the project? How do you recommend the project should be taken forward in the future? For information systems-type projects, Berndtsson et al. 2008:128–131 suggest the following structure for the main body of a final year report: n Chapter 1 – Introduction n Chapter 2 – Background n Chapter 3 – Problem description and problem statement n Chapter 4 – Theory n Chapter 5 – Methods n Chapter 6 – Results n Chapter 7 – Related work n Chapter 8 – Conclusions The Introduction and Background equivalent to a literature review are similar in nature to the outline for the software development project above. Chapter 3, in this case, identifies clearly the problem that the project is setting out to solve and why this problem is worth solving. Chapter 4 discusses any existing theories and ideas associated with the problem. Chapter 5 discusses the methods that were used and, possibly, adapted in some way to solve the problem. Chapter 6 presents the results and Chapter 7 goes on to show how these results fit in with existing work – how they contribute, complement and support and perhaps contradict the work of others in related fields. The concluding chapter works in much the same way as before although Berndtsson et al. ibid. point out that this chapter ‘should 8.2 Writing and structuring reports 191 not present any new details of the approach or results etc., which have not been explained in previous chapters.’ They also identify a number of other issues that the concluding chapter should address: n What can the results be used for? In other words, how can the reader benefit from knowing what they have learnt from the report? To what can they apply your results? n Can related research areas benefit from the results? Is what you have discovered or de- veloped applicable to other research areas? What are the limitations of the approach and of the results? n Are the results theoretical or do they have a real-world application? n How do the results compare with related research? n Has the work identified new questions that need to be answered? Has the work identified new areas of research? The structure presented by Berndtsson et al. ibid. is much the same as that sug- gested by Chinneck 1999 for graduate courses i.e., research degrees. Chinneck suggests the following chapter breakdown: n Chapter 1 – Introduction n Chapter 2 – Background n Chapter 3 – Review of the state-of-the-art n Chapter 4 – Research question or problem statement n Chapter 5 – How the problem was solved n Chapter 6 – Conclusions In this case, Chapters 1 and 2 cover the introductory and background material as before and Chapter 3 is equivalent to the literature review. Chapter 4 is equivalent to Berndtsson et al.’s 2008 Chapters 3 and 4 Problem description and problem statement and Theory and Chapter 5 encompasses Berndtsson et al.’s Chapters 5 and 6 Methods and Results. As this is a research-based report, there is more emphasis in Chapter 6 Conclusions on contributions and future work. In a similar vein, Bell 2005: 234–238 proposes the following structure for the main body of a report for research projects: n Chapter 1 – Aims and purpose n Chapter 2 – Literature review n Chapter 3 – Methods of data collection n Chapter 4 – Statement of results n Chapter 5 – Analysis and discussion n Chapter 6 – Summary and conclusions This structure is similar to that of Berndtsson et al. 2008 in which, once the background and literature review are completed, the report presents the methods of collecting data before presenting the results. In this case, the presentation of results is split across two chapters – Chapter 4 presenting a description of the data that were