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CS2113/T 2020 Jan-Apr
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    •

    • Apdx A: Module Principles Apdx C: FAQ


    Apdx B: Module Policies

    Policy on following instructions

    When working with others, especially in a large class such as CS2113/T,  it is very important that you adhere to standards, policies, and instructions imposed on everyone. Not doing so creates unnecessary headaches for everyone and puts your work attitude in a negative light. That is why we penalize repeated violations of instructions. On the other hand we do understand that humans are liable to make mistakes. That is why we only penalize repeated or frequent mistakes.

    Policy on grading smaller/larger teams : OPTIONAL

    As most of the work is graded individually, team sizes of 4 or 6 are not expected to affect your grade. While managing larger teams is harder, larger teams have more collective know-how, which can cancel each other. We'll give some consideration when grading 3-person teams.

    Policy on project work distribution

    As most of the work is graded individually, it is OK to do less or more than equal share in your project team.

    Individual Expectations

    Individual Expectations on Implementation

    • Expectation Contribute to the functional code of the product.

      • User-visible features are preferred, but it is not a strict requirement.:
      • The enhancement(s) should fit with the rest of the software (and the target user profile) and should have the consent of the team members. You will lose marks if you go 'rogue' and add things that don't fit with the product.

    • Tip: Contribute to all aspects of the project e.g. write backend code, frontend code, test code, user documentation, and developer documentation. Reason: If you limit yourself to certain aspects only, you could lose marks allocated for the aspects you did not do. In addition, the final exam assumes that you are familiar with all aspects of the project.

    • Tip: Do all the work related to your enhancement yourself. Reason:If there is no clear division of who did which enhancement, it will be difficult to divide project credit (or assign responsibility for bugs detected by testers) later.

    Individual Expectations on Documentation

    • Objective: showcase your ability to write both user-facing documentation and developer-facing documentation.
    • Expectation Update the User Guide (UG) and the Developer Guide (DG) parts that are related to the enhancements you added. The minimum requirement is given below. (Reason: Evaluators will not be able to give you marks unless there is sufficient evidence of your documentation skills.)
      • UG: at least 1 page
      • DG: at least 1 page
    • Tip: If the UG/DG updates for your enhancements are not enough to reach the above requirements, you can make up the shortfall by documenting 'proposed' features and alternative designs/implementations.
    • Expectation Use at least some of the UML diagrams in your DG updates i.e., diagrams you added yourself or those you modified significantly.

    Individual Expectations on Testing

    • Expectation Write some automated tests so that we can evaluate your ability to write tests.

    🤔 How much testings is enough? We expect you to decide. You learned different types of testing and what they try to achieve. Based on that, you should decide how much of each type is required. Similarly, you can decide to what extent you want to automate tests, depending on the benefits and the effort required.
    There is no requirement for a minimum coverage level. Note that in a production environment you are often required to have at least 90% of the code covered by tests. In this project, it can be less. The weaker your tests are, the higher the risk of bugs, which will cost marks if not fixed before the final submission.

    Individual Expectations on Teamwork

    • Expectation Do a fair share of the team-tasks.

    Team-tasks are the tasks that someone in the team has to do. Marks allocated to team-tasks will be divided among team members based on how much each member contributed to those tasks.

    Here is a non-exhaustive list of team-tasks:

    1. Necessary general code enhancements
    2. Setting up tools e.g., GitHub, Gradle
    3. Maintaining the issue tracker
    4. Release management
    5. Updating user/developer docs that are not specific to a feature e.g. documenting the target user profile
    6. Incorporating more useful tools/libraries/frameworks into the product or the project workflow (e.g. automate more aspects of the project workflow using a GitHub plugin)

    • Expectation Assume a fair share of project roles and responsibilities.

    Roles indicate aspects you are in charge of and responsible for. E.g., if you are in charge of documentation, you are the person who should allocate which parts of the documentation is to be done by who, ensure the document is in right format, ensure consistency etc.

    This is a non-exhaustive list; you may define additional roles.

    • Team lead: Responsible for overall project coordination.
    • Documentation (short for ‘in charge of documentation’): Responsible for the quality of various project documents.
    • Testing: Ensures the testing of the project is done properly and on time.
    • Code quality: Looks after code quality, ensures adherence to coding standards, etc.
    • Deliverables and deadlines: Ensure project deliverables are done on time and in the right format.
    • Integration: In charge of versioning of the code, maintaining the code repository, integrating various parts of the software to create a whole.
    • Scheduling and tracking: In charge of defining, assigning, and tracking project tasks.
    • [Tool ABC] expert: e.g. Intellij expert, Git expert, etc. Helps other team member with matters related to the specific tool.
    • In charge of[Area XYZ] of the code: e.g. In charge of the code that deals with storage, etc. If you are in charge of an area, you are expected to know that area well, and review changes done to that code.

    Ensure each of the important roles are assigned to one person in the team. It is OK to have a 'backup' for each role, but for each aspect there should be one person who is unequivocally the person responsible for it. Reason: when everyone is responsible for everything, no one is.
    • Expectation Review each others work. Reason: reviewing skills is a learning outcome, and it is mutually beneficial.

    Policy on absence due to valid reasons (e.g. MC, LOA, University events) : OPTIONAL

    There is no need to inform us. If you miss a lecture/tutorial for a valid reason, just do your best to catch up. We'll be happy to help if required. An occasional absence or two is not expected to affect your participation marks. 
    Only if you fail to earn full marks for participation we will consider giving an alternative avenue to earn marks missed due to the absences.

    Policy on email response time

    Normally, the prof will respond within 24 hours if it was an email sent to the prof or a forum post directed at the prof. If you don't get a response within that time, please feel free to remind the prof. It is likely that the prof did not notice your post or the email got stuck somewhere.

    Similarly we expect you to check email regularly and respond to emails written to you personally (not mass email) promptly.

    Not responding to a personal email is a major breach of professional etiquette (and general civility). Imagine how pissed off you would be if you met the prof along the corridor, said 'Hi prof, good morning' and the prof walked away without saying anything back. Not responding to a personal email is just as bad. Always take a few seconds to at least acknowledge such emails.  It doesn't take long to type "Noted. Thanks" and hit 'send'.

    The promptness of a reply is even more important when the email is requesting you for something that you cannot provide. Imagine you wrote to the prof requesting a reference letter and the prof did not respond at all because he/she did not want to give you one; You'll be quite frustrated because you wouldn't know whether to look for another prof or wait longer for a response. Saying 'No' is fine and in fact a necessary part of professional life; but saying nothing is not acceptable. If you didn't reply, the sender will not even know whether you received the email.

    Policy on tech help

    Do not expect your tutor to code or debug for you. We strongly discourage tutors from giving technical help directly to their own teams because we want to train you in troubleshooting tech problems yourselves. Allowing direct tech help from tutors transfers the troubleshooting responsibility to tutors.

    It is ok to ask for help from classmates even for assignments, even from other teams, as long as you don't copy from others and submit as your own. It doesn't matter who is helping you as long as you are learning from it.

    We encourage you to give tech help to each other, but do it in a way that the other person learns from it.

    Related: [Admin: Appendix D: Getting Help]

    Policy on publishing submissions : OPTIONAL

    The source code are publicly available and are available for reuse by others without any restrictions. 
    Is publishing submissions unfair to the author? We don't think so. If you were the first to think of something your peers are willing to adopt later, that means you are already ahead of them and they are unlikely to earn more marks by adopting your ideas.

    Policy on plagiarism

    We encourage sharing, but you should share with everyone in the class, not just a selected group. That is,

    • You are not allowed to share individual assignments with classmates directly.
    • You are not allowed to share project-related things with other teams directly.

    You can even reuse each other's work subject to the 'reuse policy' given below.

    If you submit code (or adopt ideas) taken from elsewhere, you need to comply with our reuse policy.

    Detection:

    • Detecting plagiarism in code is quite easy. You are not fooling anyone by reordering code or renaming methods/variables.
    • As all your work is publicly visible on GitHub, sooner or later somebody will notice the plagiarism.

    Penalties:

    • For submissions not affecting marks: We make a record of cases of plagiarism but we do not take further action. Such plagiarism does not disadvantage other students. Therefore, we prefer to spend all available resources on helping honest students to do better rather than to chase after dishonest students. If you think you gain something by plagiarizing, go ahead and do it. It's your choice and it's your loss.
    • For the final project/exam: Any case of claiming others' work as yours will be reported to the university for disciplinary action.

    Policy on reuse

    Reuse is encouraged. However, note that reuse has its own costs (such as the learning curve, additional complexity, usage restrictions, and unknown bugs). Furthermore, you will not be given credit for work done by others. Rather, you will be given credit for reusing work done by others.

    • You are allowed to reuse work from your classmates, subject to following conditions:
      • The work has been shared publicly by us or the authors.
      • You clearly give credit to the original author(s).
    • You are allowed to reuse work from external sources, subject to following conditions:
      • The work comes from a source of 'good standing' (such as an established open source project). This means you cannot reuse code written by an outside 'friend'.
      • You clearly give credit to the original author. Acknowledge use of third party resources clearly e.g. in the welcome message, splash screen (if any) or under the 'about' menu. If you are open about reuse, you are less likely to get into trouble if you unintentionally reused something copyrighted.
      • You do not violate the license under which the work has been released. Please  do not use 3rd-party images/audio in your software unless they have been specifically released to be used freely. Just because you found it in the Internet does not mean it is free for reuse.
      • Always get permission from us before you reuse third-party libraries. Please post your 'request to use 3rd party library' in our forum. That way, the whole class get to see what libraries are being used by others.

    Giving credit for reused work

    Given below are how to give credit for things you reuse from elsewhere. These requirements are specific to this module i.e., not applicable outside the module (outside the module you should follow the rules specified by your employer and the license of the reused work)

    If you used a third party library:

    • iP/tP: Mention in the README file (under the Acknowledgements section)
    • tP: Mention in the Project Portfolio Page if the library has a significant relevance to the features you implemented

    If you reused code snippets found on the Internet e.g. from StackOverflow answers or
    referred code in another software or
    referred project code by current/past student:

    • If you read the code to understand the approach and implemented it yourself, mention it as a comment
      Example: 
      //Solution below adapted from https://stackoverflow.com/a/16252290
      {Your implmentation of the reused solution here ...}
    • If you copy-pasted a non-trivial code block (possibly with minor modifications renaming, layout changes, changes to comments, etc.), also mark the code block as reused code (using @@author tags)
      Format: 
      //@@author {yourGithubUsername}-reused
      //{Info about the source...}

      {Reused code (possibly with minor modifications) here ...}

      //@@author
      Example of reusing a code snippet (with minor modifications): 
      persons = getList()
      //@@author johndoe-reused
      //Reused from https://stackoverflow.com/a/34646172 with minor modifications
      Collections.sort(persons, new Comparator<CustomData>() {
          @Override
          public int compare(CustomData lhs, CustomData rhs) {
              return lhs.customInt > rhs.customInt ? -1 : 0;
          }
      });
      //@@author
      return persons;
      

    Adding @@author tags indicate authorship

    • Mark your code with a //@@author {yourGithubUsername}. Note the double @.
      The //@@author tag should indicates the beginning of the code you wrote. The code up to the next //@@author tag or the end of the file (whichever comes first) will be considered as was written by that author. Here is a sample code file:

      //@@author johndoe
      method 1 ...
      method 2 ...
      //@@author sarahkhoo
      method 3 ...
      //@@author johndoe
      method 4 ...

    • If you don't know who wrote the code segment below yours, you may put an empty //@@author (i.e. no GitHub username) to indicate the end of the code segment you wrote. The author of code below yours can add the GitHub username to the empty tag later. Here is a sample code with an empty author tag:

      method 0 ...
      //@@author johndoe
      method 1 ...
      method 2 ...
      //@@author
      method 3 ...
      method 4 ...

    • The author tag syntax varies based on file type e.g. for java, css, fxml. Use the corresponding comment syntax for non-Java files.
      Here is an example code from an xml/fxml file.

      <!-- @@author sereneWong -->
      <textbox>
        <label>...</label>
        <input>...</input>
      </textbox>
      ...

    • Do not put the //@@author inside java header comments.
      👎

      /**
        * Returns true if ...
        * @@author johndoe
        */

      👍

      //@@author johndoe
      /**
        * Returns true if ...
        */

    What to and what not to annotate

    • Annotate both functional and test code There is no need to annotate documentation files.

    • Annotate only significant size code blocks that can be reviewed on its own e.g., a class, a sequence of methods, a method.
      Claiming credit for code blocks smaller than a method is discouraged but allowed. If you do, do it sparingly and only claim meaningful blocks of code such as a block of statements, a loop, or an if-else statement.

      • If an enhancement required you to do tiny changes in many places, there is no need to annotate all those tiny changes; you can describe those changes in the Project Portfolio page instead.
      • If a code block was touched by more than one person, either let the person who wrote most of it (e.g. more than 80%) take credit for the entire block, or leave it as 'unclaimed' (i.e., no author tags).
      • Related to the above point, if you claim a code block as your own, more than 80% of the code in that block should have been written by yourself. For example, no more than 20% of it can be code you reused from somewhere.
      • GitHub has a blame feature and a history feature that can help you determine who wrote a piece of code.

    • Do not try to boost the quantity of your contribution using unethical means such as duplicating the same code in multiple places. In particular, do not copy-paste test cases to create redundant tests. Even repetitive code blocks within test methods should be extracted out as utility methods to reduce code duplication. Individual members are responsible for making sure code attributed to them are correct. If you notice a team member claiming credit for code that he/she did not write or use other questionable tactics, you can email us (after the final submission) to let us know.

    • If you wrote a significant amount of code that was not used in the final product,

      • Create a folder called {project root}/unused
      • Move unused files (or copies of files containing unused code) to that folder
      • use //@@author {yourGithubUsername}-unused to mark unused code in those files (note the suffix unused) e.g.
      //@@author johndoe-unused
      method 1 ...
      method 2 ...

      Please put a comment in the code to explain why it was not used.

    • If you reused code from elsewhere, mark such code as //@@author {yourGithubUsername}-reused (note the suffix reused) e.g.

      //@@author johndoe-reused
      method 1 ...
      method 2 ...

    • You can use empty @@author tags to mark code as not yours when RepoSense attribute the to you incorrectly.

      • Code generated by the IDE/framework, should not be annotated as your own.

      • Code you modified in minor ways e.g. adding a parameter. These should not be claimed as yours but you can mention these additional contributions in the Project Portfolio page if you want to claim credit for them.

      

    At the end of the project each student is required to submit a Project Portfolio Page.

    PPP Objectives

    • For you to use (e.g. in your resume) as a well-documented data point of your SE experience
    • For evaluators to use as a data point to evaluate your project contributions

    PPP Sections to include

    • Overview: A short overview of your product to provide some context to the reader. The opening 1-2 sentences may be reused by all team members. If your product overview extends beyond 1-2 sentences, the remainder should be written by yourself.
    • Summary of Contributions --Suggested items to include:
      • Code contributed: Give a link to your code on tP Code Dashboard. The link is available in the Project List Page -- linked to the icon under your photo.
      • Enhancements implemented: A summary of the enhancements you implemented.
      • Contributions to documentation: Which sections did you contribute to the UG?
      • Contributions to the DG: Which sections did you contribute to the DG? Which UML diagrams did you add/updated?
      • Contributions to team-based tasks :
      • Review/mentoring contributions: Links to PRs reviewed, instances of helping team members in other ways
      • Contributions beyond the project team:
        • Evidence of helping others e.g. responses you posted in our forum, bugs you reported in other team's products,
        • Evidence of technical leadership e.g. sharing useful information in the forum

    Team-tasks are the tasks that someone in the team has to do. Marks allocated to team-tasks will be divided among team members based on how much each member contributed to those tasks.

    Here is a non-exhaustive list of team-tasks:

    1. Necessary general code enhancements
    2. Setting up tools e.g., GitHub, Gradle
    3. Maintaining the issue tracker
    4. Release management
    5. Updating user/developer docs that are not specific to a feature e.g. documenting the target user profile
    6. Incorporating more useful tools/libraries/frameworks into the product or the project workflow (e.g. automate more aspects of the project workflow using a GitHub plugin)

    Keep in mind that evaluators will use the PPP to estimate your project effort. We recommend that you mention things that will earn you a fair score e.g., explain how deep the enhancement is, why it is complete, how hard it was to implement etc..

    • [Optional] Contributions to the User Guide (Extracts): Reproduce the parts in the User Guide that you wrote. This can include features you implemented as well as features you propose to implement.
      The purpose of allowing you to include proposed features is to provide you more flexibility to show your documentation skills. e.g. you can bring in a proposed feature just to give you an opportunity to use a UML diagram type not used by the actual features.

    • [Optional] Contributions to the Developer Guide (Extracts): Reproduce the parts in the Developer Guide that you wrote. Ensure there is enough content to evaluate your technical documentation skills and UML modelling skills. You can include descriptions of your design/implementations, possible alternatives, pros and cons of alternatives, etc.

    • [Optional] If you plan to use the PPP in your Resume, you can also include your SE work outside of the module (will not be graded).

    PPP Format

    • To convert the UG/DG/PPP into PDF format, go to the generated page in your project's github.io site and use this technique to save as a pdf file. Using other techniques can result in poor quality resolution (will be considered a bug) and unnecessarily large files. You may un-tick the background graphics option as well if you wish.

    Saving as PDF files

    1. Use Chrome to load the page you want to save as pdf.

    2. Click on the Print option in Chrome’s menu.

    3. Set the destination to Save as PDF, then click Save to save a copy of the file in PDF format. For best results, use the settings indicated in the screenshot below.

    • Ensure hyperlinks in the pdf files work. Your UG/DG/PPP will be evaluated using PDF files during the PE. Broken/non-working hyperlinks in the PDF files will be reported as bugs and will count against your project score. Again, use the conversion technique given above to ensure links in the PDF files work.

    PPP Page Limit

    Content Recommended Hard Limit
    Overview + Summary of contributions 0.5-1 2
    [Optional] Contributions to the User Guide 1-3
    [Optional] Contributions to the Developer Guide 3-6
    • The page limits given above are after converting to PDF format. The actual amount of content you require is actually less than what these numbers suggest because the HTML → PDF conversion adds a lot of spacing around content.

    Policy on help from outsiders

    In general, you are not allowed to involve outsiders in your project except your team members and the teaching team. However, It is OK to give your product to others for the purpose of getting voluntary user feedback. It is also OK to learn from others as long as they don't do your project work themselves.

    Policy on deadline extensions

    Learning to honor deadlines is a learning outcome of this module. Therefore, we do not normally extend module deadlines to accommodate those who missed the deadline, unless there are some extraordinary circumstances.


    Apdx A: Module Principles Apdx C: FAQ