Project Milestones

Milestone	Suggested timing	Evidence
Topic + initial bibliography	Week 3	5–10 sources, one-sentence RQ
Proposal	Week 5	scoped method + baseline + subjects
Reproduction baseline	Week 7	baseline runs end-to-end
Prototype / extension	Week 9	method implementation
Pilot evaluation	Week 10	small result + failure analysis
Full experiment	Week 12	frozen subjects/configs
Artifact freeze	Week 13	reproducibility check
Presentation + report	Week 14	final evidence

Tip

Freeze the experiment design before looking repeatedly at the final test results. Otherwise tuning can silently turn the test set into a validation set.