Final Report

The final report represents the culmination of your year of work. It is the major component of your final grade. You will want to devote much time and effort throughout the year towards the report. The report will be read by your supervisor(s) and by a second reader. Together, they will present their recommendations to the department concerning your final grade. The content of the final report will have the biggest impact on your final grade. The key information we are looking for is not how good or advanced your prototype or proposed solution is. Rather, we are looking for evidence that you applied knowledge and skills acquired in earlier work in a team setting, managing your project progress accordingly: how you were able to go about (and explain!) the process of engineering design of your solution. Designing typically requires one to explore alternatives and decide which one(s) to really consider in light of non-functional requirements. Many solutions that satisfy functional requirements can be considered and only a subset of those do satisfy non-functional requirements.

Since the year of 2017/2018, only the electronic copy of the final report is required. You need to submit your project report online, as well as by email to your project supervisor.  

Requirements and Writing Guidelines:

  1. General guidelines and suggestions – including the required title page – for producing a professional report are offered in this System Department’s document.
  2. As discussed in the above document, Chapter 1 is expected to be the standard introduction to the problem, concluding with an overview of the rest of the report.
  3. To satisfy SYSC-4907 requirements, all reports must contain a standard Chapter 2 (.doc). The size of each sub-section will depend on your particular problem. For example, health and safety considerations are a large factor and should be discussed in depth for healthcare-related projects, but may be of a minor concern for a web-based game. From 2017/2018, it is required to justify how the project relates to the degree program of each group member in the final report. Ask your supervisor for help if needed.
  4. Beyond Chapter 2, there will be great variety in the chapter-by-chapter content of reports, due to the diversity of projects run in the department. Consult your supervisor for help and remember that the objective of the project is to demonstrate your engineering professionalism. All engineering – whether communications or hardware or software – share the tasks of requirements, design, implementation and testing.
  5. NEW STARTING IN 2020/21: The final report needs to contain your original project proposal (for example, as an Appendix or a separate chapter in your main document). It is not uncommon that changes in your project goals and objectives, methods used to achieve them, etc., may have occurred over the course of the project. Therefore, in a final chapter in the report, entitled “Reflections”, discuss how well the original project objectives were met. Identify and discuss any changes that occurred as the project progressed. Finally, as part of this chapter, reflect, as a group, on the past two terms. Did the project unfold as expected? Did the team work result in unexpected challenges or benefits? With hindsight, if you had to undertake the project again, would you make the same initial decisions about tools/methods/timelines?
  6. For a professional finish to your document, it is recommended that you use the same practices that are used for Master and PhD theses. If you are in doubt about any practice, consult with your supervisor.  Full details are available at Graduate Studies link.
    • The same font must be used throughout the entire document, with exceptions for code, tables, and other illustrative examples. Any standard and simple font of size 12 is recommended. The text should be double spaced, with variable spacing in tables and figures permitted. Footnotes and long quotations may be single spaced. Use bold type and italics instead of underlining for headings.
    • The report is to be printed on an 8 1/2″ x 11″ page (or the metric equivalent). The left margin should be 1 1/2″; you want to ensure that the binding does not interfere with the text. All other margins should be one full inch.
    • All pages must be numbered in sequence.

An older guideline for writing final reports can be found here. Please note that this was put together many years ago, when projects were individual projects. While some of the advice is still valid, many things have since changed, including the mandatory parts of the report (Chapter 2, inclusion of the original project proposal, Chapter “Reflections”). So one cannot overstate the importance of discussing the report, its structure and content, with your project supervisor.

Last update: Nov 2025.