CS246—Deliverables

CS246—Deliverables, Group Project 
Your project will be graded based on correctness and completeness (60%), documentation (20%),
and design (20%). Grading will proceed in two phases, outlined below:
Correctness and Completeness
The correctness and completeness component of your project will be assessed via a live demo in
front of a TA. You will need to sign up for a 20-minute demo slot with a TA; all group members
should show up, and you should plan a demo that takes the TA on a tour through all of the required
features of the project. Be prepared to explain to the TA how you implemented the various parts
of your project. At any time, the TA may ask you to demonstrate a particular element of your
project (e.g., whether some boundary case is handled properly). If there is a component of your
project that is not working, advise the TA, rather than pretend that it does.
After you have demonstrated the core requirements, you may demonstrate any additional features of the project that you may have implemented, for extra credit. The TA will assess the worth
of your additional features after your demo is over.
Documentation and Design
The design of your project is an important part of your overall assessment. For top grades, it is not
enough that your program simply work; it must demonstrate a solid object-oriented design. Thus,
you will need to spend considerable time planning out your classes and their interactions, aiming to
minimize coupling while maximizing cohesion. You must plan for change in your program. Imagine
that the specification will change on the day before the final due date (it won’t, but imagine it
will). How easily can you accommodate change?
As part of your design, you should anticipate various ways your project could change. Perhaps
a change in rules, or input syntax, or a whole new feature—who knows? Plan all of your project
features to accommodate change, with minimal modification to your original program, and minimal
recompilation. In your final design document, outline the ways in which your design accommodates
new features and changes to existing features. Be specific. You may wish to implement some of
these for extra credit. This discussion is a very important component of your design
grade; if you spend less than a page on it, you probably aren’t saying enough.
Your documentation and design will be assessed via written documents that you will submit to
Marmoset as pdfs.
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Extra Credit Features
All of the available projects give you the opportunity to earn up to 10% extra credit for enhancements to the core projects. Keep the following rules and guidelines in mind when planning
enhancements:
• It is far more important to have your core project working well, than to have a poorly done
project with extras. Remember, the enhancements are only worth 10%. Your documentation
and design are also more valuable than your enhancements, so please take time to do these
well.
• Your program must be able to run the core project, without enhancements, as well as with
them. You are not allowed to submit two programs for grading, one with enhancements and
one without. You are also not allowed to recompile your program with different compiler
flags to produce versions with and without enhancements. You may select or deselect your
enhancements via flag arguments on the command line. (E.g. ./project -enablebonus, or
something similar.) Even better would be if you could turn your enhancements on and off
dynamically, as the program is running.
• Markers will not assign values to individual bonus features during the demo. You may show
what you have done, and the TA will take note, but values will be decided once all demos are
completed.
• One enhancement that is available for all three projects is offered as a challenge: complete
the entire project, without leaks, and without explicitly managing your own memory. In
other words, handle all memory management via vectors and smart pointers. If you do this,
there should be no delete statements in your program at all, and very few raw pointers (the
only raw pointers you would be permitted to have are those that are not meant to express
ownership). Successful completion of this challenge will earn you 4 of the available 10 bonus
marks. If your program leaks, these marks cannot be earned. Also note that these 4 marks
are not reserved for this feature; it is theoretically possible to get all 10 bonus marks without
implementing this challenge.
On Due Date 1
Submit a plan of attack. This should include a UML that describes how you anticipate your system
to be structured (even if you complete the project by due date 1, the UML you submit must be
one that you built prior to starting the project).
Your UML should show the classes that make up your project and the relationships between
them. You only need to show public methods (i.e, you can leave out private fields and protected/private methods, unless you need to show them to illustrate a point, e.g., a design pattern).
Do not show the big 5 operations, or any other constructors, accessors, or mutators. You will not
graded on the degree to which you adhere to this model, but you will be asked to account for any
differences that arise between this model and your final submission. File: uml.pdf.
In addition, your plan of attack must include a breakdown of the project, indicating what you
plan to do first, what will come next, and so on. Include estimated completion dates, and which
partner will be responsible for which parts of the project. You should try to stick to your plan, but
you will not be graded by the degree to which you stick to it. Your initial plan should be realistic,
and you will be expected to explain why you had to deviate from your plan (if you did).
Finally, your initial plan of attack must include answers to all questions listed within the project
specification itself. You should answer in terms of how you would anticipate solving these problems
in your project, even though you are not strictly required to do so. If your answers turn out to be
inconsistent with your final design, you will have an opportunity to submit revised answers on Due
Date 2.
Your plan should be no more than 5 pages long.
On Due Date 2
On Due Date 2, you must submit all of your code to Marmoset, together with a Makefile, such that
issuing the command make builds your project. Your executable should be called watan for Watan,
cc3k for ChamberCrawler 3000, or quadris for Quadris.
In addition, you must submit a final design document. It must outline the final, actual design
of your project, and how it differed from your design on Due Date 1 (if it did). You should include
an updated UML, reflecting the actual structure of your project. Do this even if it is the same as
the original UML.
Your document should provide an overview of all aspects of your project, including how, at a
high level, they were implemented. If you made use of design patterns, clearly indicate where.
Your system should employ good object-oriented design techniques, as presented in class.
Include all answers to questions posed within the project specification, and indicate how they
differ from the answers you gave on Due Date 1 (if they did).
You should not expect the TA to read through all of your code. Therefore, your design document
should stand alone – the TA should not need to have your code open in order to understand your
document. However, if you wish to highlight certain aspects of your design, you should indicate
clearly where they can be found in your code, if the TA wants to have a look.
The most important aspect of your design document is a discussion of how your chosen design
accommodates change, as described earlier in this document. You should also discuss the cohesion
and coupling of your chosen program modules. Most of the design portion of your grade will be
based on this summary.
Finally, answer the following questions:
1. What lessons did this project teach you about developing software in teams? If you worked
alone, what lessons did you learn about writing large programs?
2. What would you have done differently if you had the chance to start over?
Length and Format of Document
We expect that your final document will be 5–10 pages long, where each page has a word density
similar to what you see in this guideline document.
Organize your document into sections, using the following headings:
• Introduction (if needed)
• Overview (describe the overall structure of your project)
• Updated UML
• Design (describe the specific techniques you used to solve the various design challenges in the
project)
• Resilience to Change (describe how your design supports the possiblity of various changes to
the program specification)
• Answers to Questions (the ones in your project specification)
• Extra Credit Features (what you did, why they were challenging, how you solved them—if
necessary)
• Final Questions (the last two questions in this document).
• Conclusion (if needed)
The document you submit will be used for both your documentation mark and your design
mark. Your design will be assessed according to how you solved the problem, as described in
your document, and in your Due Date 1 UML. Your documentation will be graded according to
how well you described your project, how well you described your design (i.e., is it clear and wellcommunicated?), and your Due Date 1 document. Together, these account for 40% of your
grade, so these documents are very important. The Due Date 2 document is worth much
more than the Due Date 1 document.