Guidelines for Reverse Engineering Report

Daniel Jackson
October 4, 1998

What to hand in and when

Weds October 7. Be prepared to make a short presentation. No more than 15 minutes including discussion, so plan for 10 minutes of presentation: approx 3-5 slides. Bring hard copy of whatever you present for DJ. This must include a cover sheet with the title (reverse engineering project), date, team name and members, URL of report. Feel free to make copies of graphs etc for entire class.
Fri October 9. Written report due to DJ, as described below. Send URL by email.

Questions, not answers

Remember that this is not a toy project, so you are not expected to have resolved all issues by the time you present or hand in your report. You will have opportunities to add to your report or correct it later, and to enlist the help of other teams in answering questions and probing further. Moreover, there will be important issues that we simply will not have time to address.

This makes it very important to be candid in your report about how confident your are in your assertions, and where you think more work should be done. Identifying and documenting at least the existence of obscure issues is very useful!

I plan to collate a bunch of questions after this phase to ask NASA.

General stylistic issues

all report files should be in a separate directory so they can later be copied into the class website easily.
all in HTML; feel free to include links to Word, ppt, etc.
figures as GIF images (also add links to postscript if you like)
report should be self-contained: no links to outside URLs, except perhaps to NASA and CSC sites

Report Structure

Your report should have at least the following sections:

Heading. Include team name and members, title and date.
Overview. Brief description of what you analyzed and why it's interesting.
Approach. How you did it: what tools you used, where they helped and didn't.
Analysis. The detailed results of your analysis.
Anomalies. Things you discovered that make you suspect that you don't fully understand what's going on.

Followup. Unresolved questions; areas to pursue; aspects of the report that are suspect and should be checked.

Example

Here's a draft version of the report I'm working on.