On writing weekly lab book entries

Posted on Sunday Oct 19, 2008

Every week before the one-on-one meeting (if no regular one-on-one meeting arranged, then on a weekly base), a student should submit a lab book entry in our group wiki http://sites.google.com/a/ncsu.edu/ncsu-ase/Home/Labbooks for
*. Planned activities
*. Actual outcomes

For the "Actual outcome" category, you basically copy the "Planned activities" from the preceding week and then annotate them with the actual outcomes.

For each category, you need to organize your items in the following subcategories:

*. Tool development
Description of your task items
Expected artifacts: (here you put only specific tool components, with the details of the location in CVS, e.g., the genAxim method of /toolsrc/jias/jias/axioms/

Axiom.java)

*. Empirical evaluation
Description of your task items
Expected artifacts:(here you put only the writing portions for describing the evaluation or its results, with the details of the location in CVS, e.g., the evaluation section of /papers/icsm08-soa/)

*. Paper writing
Description of your task items
Expected artifacts:(here you put only the writing portions, with the details of the location in CVS, e.g., the approach section of /papers/icsm08-soa/)

*. Misc
Other task items not falling into the three preceding categories

Your task item's description shall be detailed enough so that I can distinguish it from a previous item in previous weeks. For example, you shouldn't put the same item description like "Preparing a Journal Version of XXXX" in multiple weeks. That is, from your description, I can tell the semantic difference of your new task item from any of your previous items in previous weeks.

Note that only recognizable artifacts are tool source code and formal writing in LaTeX being put in CVS. The artifact description shall describe enough details for me to trace down to the artifacts without further asking you. If you cannot put an artifact for a task item in one of the first three categories, you shall move the task item to the "Misc" category. For example, "Explore various tools such as XXX to use in the tool development" shouldn't be put under "Tool development" since there is no artifact (tool source code) being produced by this task item. This task item shall be put under "Misc"; just like reading research papers, you should always explore various tools along the way of your actual tool development.

For the "Actual outcomes", you copy the "Planned activities" over and annotate each item with some description of the completed portion. You also need to list "Actual artifacts" after the "Expected artifacts".

If you don't produce any portion of an expected artifact, you need to put "None produced" and color that item with the red color. If you produce only partial portions of the expected artifact, color that item with the orange color.