The purpose of this Project Description is to present the ideas proposed and decisions made during the preliminary envisioning and inception phase of the project. The goal is to analyze an initial concept proposal at a strategic level of detail and attain/compose an agreement between the project team members and the project customer (mentors and instructors) on the desired solution and overall project direction.
This template proposal contains a number of sections, which you can edit/modify/add/delete/organize as you like. Some key sections we’d like to have in the proposal are:
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Vision: An executive summary of the vision, goals, users, and general scope of the intended project.
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Solution Concept: the approach the project team will take to meet the business needs. This section also provides an overview of the architectural and technical designs made for implementing the project.
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Scope: the boundary of the solution defined by itemizing the intended features and functions in detail, determining what is out of scope, a release strategy and possibly the criteria by which the solution will be accepted by users and operations.
Project Proposal can be used during the follow-up analysis and design meetings to give context to efforts of more detailed technical specifications and plans. It provides a clear direction for the project team; outlines project goals, priorities, and constraints; and sets expectations.
The vision section describes the final desired state of the project once the project is complete. It also specifies the key goals of the project. This section provides a context for decision-making. A shared vision among all team members can help ensuring that the solution meets the intended goals. A solid vision clarifies perspective and facilitates decision-making.
The vision statement should be specific enough that you can look at a proposed solution and say either "yes, this meets the vision and goals", or "no, it does not".
This section describes the principal user roles of the project together with the key characteristics of these roles. This information will inform the design and the user scenarios. A complete set of roles helps in ensuring that high-level requirements can be identified in the product backlog.
Again, the description should be specific enough that you can determine whether user A, performing action B, is a member of the set of users the project is designed for.
The Scope places a boundary around the solution by detailing the range of features and functions of the project. This section helps to clarify the solution scope and can explicitly state what will not be delivered as well.
It should be specific enough that you can determine that e.g. feature A is in-scope, while feature B is out-of-scope.
This section provides a high-level outline of the solution.
Global Architectural Structure Of the Project:
This section provides a high-level architecture or a conceptual diagram showing the scope of the solution. If wireframes or visuals have already been done, this section could also be used to show how the intended solution will look. This section also provides a walkthrough explanation of the architectural structure.
Design Implications and Discussion:
This section discusses the implications and reasons of the design decisions made during the global architecture design.
This section discusses the minimum acceptance criteria at the end of the project and stretch goals.
Release planning section describes how the project will deliver incremental sets of features and functions in a series of releases to completion. Identification of user stories associated with iterations that will ease/guide sprint planning sessions is encouraged. Higher level details for the first iteration is expected.
Remember that you can always add features at the end of the semester, but you can't go back in time and gain back time you spent on features that you couldn't complete.
For more help on markdown, see https://github.com/adam-p/markdown-here/wiki/Markdown-Cheatsheet
In particular, you can add images like this (clone the repository to see details):
