Overview of Critique Assignments
As you know, in 6.033 you’ll complete a series of three critiques, designed to build analytical and communication skills. The first critique required you to understand and assess a distributed system based on an analytical framework presented in the critique worksheet. In this critique, you’ll use your answers to a similar worksheet to write a 2–3 page critique of the system. (You will receive feedback on Critique 1 well before this assignment is due.) The third critique will take the form of a peer review of another team’s Design Project Report. You’ll receive instruction about each of these critiques as the semester progresses.
This Critique
For this critique, you should evaluate and assess MapReduce using the critique worksheet (PDF). This worksheet walks you through the process of analyzing the system described in lecture and in the textbook.
After filling in the worksheet, use the following guidelines to organize your analysis into a 2–3 page critique of MapReduce. Your audience is a community of peers who have not read the paper.
Before beginning to write, think about how you might organize your critique. You might assess each module in turn, or each design goal. You might order design goals by importance (e. g. most to least important) or by strength (strongest to weakest-or the reverse!). Use your introduction to forecast and your conclusion to recap.
The critique should be approximately 750–900 words. You should familiarize yourself with the rubric (PDF) to understand the specific elements we will use to evaluate your writing (your Teaching Assistant will also be grading this assignment, for technical content).
- Introduction explains the goals and components of the system before making a claim about how it prioritizes properties based upon its use cases.
- Body of the paper presents your analysis of the system by explaining how the system prioritizes properties within its design and the limits of the system and its modules.
- Conclusion summarizes the system and its key advantages and disadvantages.
