Typical Questions Addressed in a Survey Paper

The questions, below, are offered as typical questions in a survey paper that require creativity in technical writing. As before, students can write a survey paper (usually of 3 published papers) of papers in the course, or of papers in a literature survey for your own research, or else a description of software under development.

If you are describing software, then replace "community" by "software" in the questions below, and then also comment on other implementation approaches that would have accomplished the same goals as your software.

  1. What is the community for these papers?
  2. What is the _big_ goal for that community?
  3. What are the common approaches for that goal? (Perhaps you can review a )simple_ taxonomy in Wikipedia, or a good survey paper, or the related work of a recent paper.)
  4. Where do the papers being surveyed now fit in this taxonomy?
  5. Are the approaches of the papers being surveyed likely to succeed in accomplishing the big goal? (i.e., What are the strengths and weaknesses in relation to the big goal?)
  6. How do these approaches help accomplish the big goal? (What would be the milestones?)
  7. What are the risks of failure?
  8. Is there a risk mitigation strategy? (Is there a "second best" goal that could be achieved?)