Tell me more ×
Writers Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for authors, editors, reviewers, professional writers, and aspiring writers. It's 100% free, no registration required.
up vote 2 down vote favorite
1

I'm writing my first undergraduate research paper for computer science and I think my lack of experience is starting to get on my supervisor's nerves. I've written a program that collects video metadata and attempts to organise videos into a coherent sequence using the metadata. The program has also been tested by a panel of users.

The supervisor has given me the following sections to work with:

  1. Inroduction

  2. Background

    • perhaps sub-sections on different areas of background

  3. The approach
    3.1. Overall approach
    3.2. Detailed design

  4. Key implementation decisions

  5. Experiments

  6. Related work

  7. Conclusions

I'm trying to understand the difference between (3) and (4) in the context of what I'm doing. Specifically, how is a detailed design different from implementation decisions?

share|improve this question
1  
Welcome to Writers SE. Questions here need to be useful to others; this is unfortunately too localized. We could help you with general structure questions ("How do I make an intro different than a conclusion?") but here you're asking us for advice on your particular paper, which won't help anyone not writing your paper. – Lauren Ipsum Mar 12 at 18:02
It doesn't need to be in the context of this particular paper. The sections he's given me are generic and I'm just trying to figure out how 3.2 is different from 4. I assumed it would be easier to explain is some context. – James Hadley Mar 12 at 18:07
2  
Hi James and welcome to Writers.SE. As Lauren said this is kind of localized, but to try to help you out even if this question gets closed: what I would mean by that distinction were I writing or assigning the paper is that 3 is "what you did" and 4 is "what key decisions led you to do that". You don't want to clutter up a discussion of methodology with all those "why" details, but you don't want to drop them either. – Monica Cellio♦ Mar 12 at 19:22
"Specifically, how is a detailed design different from implementation decisions?" This part of the question is answerable, the rest is a bit fuzzy and hard to pin down. Maybe we can edit this question to focus a bit more on the answerable part? – Neil Fein♦ Mar 13 at 0:46
1  
Maura's answer below is correct. No matter how detailed your design is, you won't get into questions of the actual technologies used, etc. Whereas implementation is exactly that. But I don't think this is a writing question, really; it's a software development question. – micapam Mar 13 at 5:11

1 Answer

up vote 3 down vote accepted

Design would include things like "order the data by date" or "track each author independently".

Implementation would be things like an actual database schema or a routine itself.

The key difference would be that design is "what I need to make happen" and implementation is "how did I make it happen".

share|improve this answer
Given the title "Key Implementation Decisions" I would think the implementation needs to go beyond just 'how' and also explain 'why'. Design identifies the specific problem and gives and idea of how to sort it out. Implementation states what has actually been done and why those decisions were made (Why only cat videos but not dogs? Why Chicago but not New York? and so forth). From there you can move on to the experiment on a solid foundation. – Lazarus Mar 20 at 20:39

Your Answer

 
discard

By posting your answer, you agree to the privacy policy and terms of service.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.