Writing synopsis for your project work. What a synopsis is and whats it’s purpose ?

August 16th, 2010 | 16 Comments | Posted in Career Related, Featured, Headline by admin

Ting Ting Ting… Project time !! HHhhhh…. BORING ! This is what most of our budding software professionals think. It’s sad but it’s true. They are so horrified just by the idea of working on the project that they are even ready to buy one from the market and just show it to their faculty members. Which is the most crooked thing one can do to himself / herself. Engineering as a whole and software engineering in particular are so simple and interesting that anyone would fall in love with them.You all feel that these things are difficult just because you have no knowledge about how simple they are! They are actually not difficult, it’s just that you don’t have an understanding about how simple they are. There are many different pieces which have to be brought together for building a CAREER ! And i wish to help you all in building an understanding about what all is needed through my blog posts and my LONG speeches during my training sessions !

Click here to download sample project synopsis (PDF Format).

Click here to download sample project synopsis ( .docx format, Office 2007 )

Click here to download sample project synopsis ( .doc format, Office 97 – 2003 )

In this post lets try and understand what a project synopsis is, whats it’s purpose and what all things you should include in your project synopsis. Also you can download a sample project synopsis attached with this blog post. Lets see what all things should be present in your project synopsis.

Summary of what you need to include in your project synopsis :

Project title
Team details
Aim / Objective
Technologies used
Module Introduction (Post Management)
Module Introduction ( Comments management)
Module Introduction ( Admin Module)
Current status of project development
Target audience
Market potential and expected popularity

All the above points are discussed and explained below :

Project title :

Name your project, provide it such a title that the intent of your project is clear. Refer to your project by this title in all your conversations about your project. Providing a title to your project helps your team develop a bonding with the idea they are working on.

Team details:

Next in your project synopsis you should mention the size of your team and provide a brief about what the roles and responsibilities of each team member are. Think of a project synopsis as a project proposal cum estimate you are giving to a client. The client would be paying for your work and he would obviously be interested in knowing how big is the team that will work on his stuff and for what all things is he paying ! If you provide a small section in your synopsis discussing about your team, it will help the client / faculty member understand and appreciate that the team size you chose is actually required.

A sample of what you can write in this section is as follows :

Team details:

Total team strength: 5

Total number of modules: 4

The team would be divided to work on each module. Each of the team members will play separate roles during the development of their modules. They would acts as leads, team members and QA person for different sections of the module. Once they code their modules they will be responsible as a team in performing integration with other modules developed in parallel by other teams. During this process they will be performing integration testing to make sure that all the modules get plugged in properly. After the integration is performed successfully the complete team as a whole would be responsible for deploying the system on UAT server , staging server and finally on the production server. At each step of deployment a regression testing phase will be undertaken to make sure that the functionality is working properly.

Aim / Objective

This section describes the motive behind development of your project. It should clearly define what your project is and what you intent to achieve by developing this project. A sample aim / object would be as follows :

Aim / Objective

Open source asp.net MVC blog engine would be used by individuals, companies or any other entity for hosting their blogs. It would provide full functionality that is required in a good blog website. Anybody using this blog engine would be able to post his / her blogs, receive and reply to comments, add / remove categories, enable / disable comments, add / remove users etc. This blog engine will have a complete admin panel which will be available to users in admin role. They can login to the admin section and change the settings from the project.

Technologies Used ( Technology stack )

What do i mean by technology stack ? Well a technology stack is the complete set of technologies required for the completion of a project. Projects are not completed by using just one technology. We often use more than one technologies during our project work. So this section should mention a list of all technologies that you plan to use in your project.

A sample of a technology stack would be :

Technologies used :

This project will be using the following technology stack:

a) Asp.net MVC
b) C#
c) LINQ
d) WCF
e) JQuery

Module Information :

Next in your synopsis you should discuss the modules which shall form a part of your project. The intent of this section is to provide information about what all each module will accomplish – in brief ! Just put all the functionality each module is supposed to do in bullet points, not need to explain each point. For example if i have an admin module in my project, i shall summarize that module as follows :

Module Introduction ( Admin Module)

This blog application has a complete admin panel for performing administration. The main administration is done for user management, role allocation, determining what permissions to be given to which role etc. Following are the features that would be included in this module

1) Manager blog user.
2) Manage user roles. User management would be done using asp.net membership profiles.
3) Assigning permissions to each roles. This would decide what that role can do.
4) Managing styles and themes for the blog. The user would be able to change the look and feel of the blog using this feature.
5) Add / remove categories for posts.
6) Managing user profiles.
7) Password management
8 ) Each of the steps above would have an email sent to the user and the admin to inform them about the changes and also to ask for their approval if required.

Current status of project development :

Mention the current status of your project development in this section. If you are starting your project from then very beginning then mention that your project is in the planning stage and you are about to start with the development efforts. In case you already have a project which is in a semi completed state, then mention the current state of your project and quantify the amount of work that has already been done in your project and the amount of work you shall be doing to complete it. It is very much possible that you get a project from your seniors ( or from another company ) and are carrying forward this project. This section will help your supervisor understand the effort you shall be putting towards completing your project.

Target audience :

Mention the target audience over here, the section of people for whom this project is being developed, or the section of people to whom this project will be beneficial. For example a sample target audience content would be:

Target audience

This project would be of useful to anybody interested in hosting his / her individual blog. Also this will be used for hosting blogs in a company where there will be multiple users using this blog and managing their profiles. This is an open source project so the users can at anytime modify the code as per their priorities. They would be able to share their posts with the world using RSS feeds and also categorize their posts as per their liking.

Market Potential :

Provide a brief description about what potential your project has if launched in the market. What are it’s acceptance chances and expected popularity in case your project is launched in market. Sample content that can be put in this section is :

Market potential and expected popularity

As this is an open source project the market potential for it makes no sense. There are no financial motivations behind building this project. The main motivation is experimentation and developing a world class piece of software. On the flip side the popularity of this project is expected to be huge. We expect that the number of downloads of this project would surpass 1000 in the very first year. Then with more addition in functionality the popularity of this project is expected to raise more.

Its important to approach your project work professionally and with full dedication. Prepare your synopsis in a way that anybody who reads it gets a clear idea of what you are doing and what you will deliver at the end.

In case you have any problems understand / thinking contents for your synopsis, you can contact and i shall be more than happy to help.

Thanks for reading.

All the best.

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