Final Blog Entry
The final weekly progress report forms part of the final blog entry, as does the final Evaluation below.
The presentation was finished on 27/1/2018. Although I’m not as happy with the finished product, I tend to stop and start and stutter, it will have to do, as time constraints have could up with me.
The uploaded presentation is on YouTube.
Evaluation of the Value of the Project Documentation
The project documentation proved to be valuable in following a time frame and tracking progress over the weeks. The information has also proven valuable in research work moving forward, in an attempt to uncover a zero day exploit in the Android Permissions API.
The Annotated Bibliography shows a trend in concern for the security issues within the Android API and it is well recommended by most researchers that further study is needed to assist in providing user security and improved development practices. Writing the literature review was interesting, as dozens of articles were perused when searching for a 12 article selection and between the first search and the final selection, most of the original selection had been discarded. It was helpful in gaining a better understanding of the subject domain and learning about other researchers and the goals and aims of the research community in this area. It was reassuring to see that many others more qualified than me share the same passion and concerns.
The project plan, in particular the project calendar, Gantt chart, WBS and risk analysis were useful in the real life situation of completing this subject. Making a realistic cover of potential risks assisted in maintaining the timely completion of the unit. As a person with chronic health issues, allowing for illness in the risk analysis, and assessing the consequences helped in accepting that the risk had realised and that the consequences would be lower grades. Within the charting and planning, a contingency was allowed for such a set back, providing a slack of 1-2 weeks, which assisted in ameliorating the damaging consequences.
Overall this has been rewarding and educational experience and has been essential when graduating from this Masters degree at the Australian Qualifications Framework (AQF) level 9 to proceed onto level 10 of the AQF. The course, the project structure and documentation have provided a working experience of how a literature review is vital for further research, and that weekly reporting assists in tracking the progress and development of the research and most importantly, any changes made in the scope and methodologies as information is discovered.
The amorphous nature of ITC571 proved to be a challenging way to push students to be independent, to utilise skills learnt throughout the degree to be able to be productive in the workplace or in further research. An excellent capstone subject for the end of this degree, a course I will remember fondly and miss.
