Project Report

Use the project report to document what happened during the project, not only the final outcome. The Turing Way treats project planning, progress tracking, and explicit decisions as part of reproducible and reusable research.

Why document project progress?

• Progress reports keep the team aligned on goals, scope, and current status.
• Written decisions help reviewers and future contributors understand why the project changed direction.
• Traceable reports make it easier to connect outcomes to evidence such as issues, pull requests, releases, and analyses.

What should be documented?

• Project goals, milestones, success criteria, and changes in scope.
• Important decisions, assumptions, risks, blockers, and dependencies.
• Links to evidence such as datasets, notebooks, scripts, issues, pull requests, and published outputs.
• Next actions, owners, and deadlines so the report supports follow-up work.

How should you document it?

1. Update the report on a regular cadence, for example per milestone, sprint, or release.
2. Use dated entries and link each claim to the relevant artefact in the repository when possible.
3. Separate factual progress updates from interpretation, open questions, and future plans.
4. Record both what was completed and what remains unresolved.
5. Move durable outcomes into long-lived documents such as README.md, CHANGELOG.md, or method documentation when they become part of the project’s stable guidance.

Relevant Turing Way chapters: Project Management Frameworks Overview, Roadmapping, and Research Object to capture the Research Life Cycle.