Project Report Tutorial

In this tutorial we will learn how to make a project report. Let us first learn what is actually a project report; a project report in a broader sense is the complete report of the project from the beginning to the ending, covering all the objectives, project building phases, project functionalities, scope, cost, time etc. Here we are specifically talking about project report of the projects that are made in the final year or pre-final year of computer science/information technology engineering course. 

Making a project report is not actually that difficult as it sounds, all you have to do is follow these guidelines and format for making the project report of your software or web application. The basic requirement of this is the knowledge of any popular and good word processing software like MS Word.

You need to have your project ready before you actually start creating the project report. It usually takes around a day or two to make the project report. So now let us start learning how to actually do it by following these guidelines:

Starting Page

The starting page consists of the following items:-

• Project name
• Your Name
• Your College/University name and address.
• Degree name
• College/University Logo
• Name of guide teachers
• Name of group members (if required).

You can find the format and arrangement of all of the above items in the sample project report provided for download with this tutorial. The starting page does not contain headers, footers and page numbers. Also print out this page in colored ink.

Certificate

This page contains the project certificate which is to certify that you created the project (this certificate may not be of that much use to you in the future but still it should be included in the report). The certificate contains your name and optionally the names of your group members. It is signed by the head of department later at the time of submission.

Table of contents

As most of you may already know, table of contents contains all the topics of the report in a tabular format. The contents are displayed in the form of Serial Number, Topic Name and Page Number. You can either use serial numbers or bullets/sub-bullets to list the topics here. Also this page is added in the last after the completion of the report.

Acknowledgement

This page is used to acknowledge the help and support that you received from any person. Acknowledge each and every person personally here; give all your thanks in all the way you want.

Introduction

This part contains the introduction of your project. Put a brief introduction of your project here and write about all the functionalities that are present in the project. Tell about the scope of your project, the advantages, and the benefits over the earlier system etc. Have around one to two pages of introduction about the project. Don’t put too many details here; introductory part should not be made very long.

Objectives of the project

Put the objectives of the project here. Either put your own in this part or just put the one provided in the sample report, they fit perfectly with most projects.

Feasibility Study

Feasibility study by definition is “A feasibility study is an evaluation of a proposal designed to determine the difficulty in carrying out a designated task”. There are different parts of feasibility study, they are:

• Technical Feasibility: Technical feasibility is related to the hardware and software to perform the essential computing.
• Economic return Feasibility: The new system should be economically beneficial. For that the cost/benefit analysis is performed.
• Non-economic return feasibility: The system can be justified based n benefits in the monetary terms.
• Time Feasibility: the system should be implemented within the mentioned time constrains.
• Legal and Ethical Feasibility: The new system should exist within the legal and ethical boundaries.

Explain the above points in 3-4 lines, so as to cover all aspects of the feasibility study of the project. The objective at this stage is to provide solutions to stated problems usually in the form of a specification, it actually depends on you that how much you want to explain things here.

System Requirement Specification (SRS)

A one line definition of SRS is given as:

“SRS is a vital piece of documentation that is crucial to the success of any software development project.”

If one cannot precisely state what the system should do, how can we develop the software with any confidence, and how can we hope to check that the end product meets its need, and that is the purpose of SRS document. Professional and separate SRS documents are created in professional working environment of companies, but here we just need to give a basic idea. You can download the sample SRS template provided with this tutorial; just fill in the information in the sections that you feel are necessary for your project.

Other optional parts that you can include are Requirement Analysis and System Analysis.

Data dictionary

In this part if you have used any database then list and describe about all the tables and their columns, their data type etc. explain in detail about the tables and their purpose in the project.

Create ER-Diagram and put it after the database description to explain the relationships between different tables of the database. You can create the ER-Diagram in MS PowerPoint, or any tool available online for download. 

Here is the ER-Diagram reference that you can follow to learn more about them.
ER Diagram

Create data flow diagram afterwards, you can learn to make them form here:
Data Flow Diagram

System Requirements

Write the minimum system requirements of your project, you can have the following requirements listed:

• Operating System required
• Processor
• RAM
• Hard Drive Space
• Any third party drivers or applications (that you cannot distribute with the project), etc.

Development Environment

Use this page to give the information about the development environment that you have used, it basically includes the programming languages, database systems or any other tools that you have used. List the name of programming language/environment and its version, database system and its version and any other tools used.

User Interface 

In this part you have to explain the parts or systems of user interface. To put simply, list all the menus, dialog boxes (for windows application) and web pages and their forms (for web application). List them all and give a one or two liner description about them.

 

Next we have to describe each and every form or web page in detail. It follows a general format (which can be changed according to requirement) which you can use for every other form or web page.

 

For Windows Application

• Start with the name of the form, then its one liner information below the name.
• Write the summary of the form in 3-4 lines. 
• Give information about all the controls in the form in either a tabular form or simply copy-paste the designer code.
• Put the image or screenshot or the form. You can do that by using the ‘Print Screen’ button on your keyboard, it copies the computer screen in image format in the clipboard; you can then paste it in any image processing software, like MS Paint etc.



List of controls in tabular form

• Put the code of the form after that.

For Web Application

• Start with the name of the web page and one liner description after that.
• Write the summary in 3-4 lines.
• Put the screenshot of the web page.
• And lastly put the code of the entire web page after that.

Title and summary of web page

       

If you have used any other modules or classes then put them also, by following the same format, examples are any classes or external code files.

Limitations

Here you put the limitations of your project; you can describe what else could have been done and the limitations for that. The limitations can be technical, economical, time dependent etc.

 Conclusion

In this part write in brief the basic idea of the project. Try to put in something new here without repeating anything from the above. Try to take things to introduction of the project and giving it a decent ending.

 Headers and Footers

Use headers and footers for page numbers, project name, branch name and college name. Arrange them as you like but don’t put too many details in them.

This is just a basic format that you can follow to make a project report, you can make any changes and improvements in this format if you want but try to make things systematic in a project report.


Download the sample project report and SRS template