Spring Semester 2008

January 28, 2008 – May 2, 2008

Assignment 8: Staking the Final Frontier

Out on: April 7, 2008
Due by: April 21, 2008, 11:00 am (before lecture)
Collaboration: Teams
Grading: Packaging 10%, Style 10%, Performance 10%, Design 10%, Functionality 60%

Overview

The eighth (sp?) assignment for is all about getting your final project into a state where it mostly does the things you had planned at the proposal stage. Note that some parts of this assignment are (again) not really about actual code. You'll see... :-)

This is a team assignment, and all of you should know which team you're in (I hope). Decide early on who is going to be responsible for submitting the assignment and when. Make sure to include all the relevant information (who is in the team?) in your README file! Decide on a schedule early on as well, nothing delays working in a team more than having to schedule meetings ad-hoc; compare your schedules and arrange to meet in advance! All members of a team will receive the same score for the project you submit together. After the assignment is over, each of you will be asked to evaluate the contribution your partners and yourself made to the assignment.

Problem 1: Covering Automation (30%)

You need to improve your existing build and test process by integrating the gcov tool to measure test coverage. The goal is to have enough test cases (and ideally automated ones, hint hint!) to show that you achieve 100% line coverage for your code. While this doesn't mean that you're "done" with testing, it is simple way to make sure that you're not missing anything trivially obvious anymore.

Your second task is to modify the nightly build process to actually send a concise (!) log of the build and the automated tests to your team's mailing list. This way it should be easy to tell who broke a certain build and you can collectively go after that person; on the other hand, if everything's fine, it's reassuring to get a nice "all clear" message in the morning. :-)

Finally, if for some reason your last submission did not yet conform to the "ideals" set in Problem 2 on the previous assignment, please "round things out" in a suitable way for this assignment. As a tiny reminder: You should have everything related to the project in Subversion (except for derived files of course), you should use make or a similar tool to automate building and (to the extent possible) testing, you should use cron to regularly run a clean build and all your tests, you should have easily accessible developer documentation, maybe out of doxygen; feel free to write scripts to help with any or all of these tasks.

You must submit all your automation scripts and a short description of your automation setup when you turn in your project!

Problem 2: Working Implementation (70%)

The most important part of this assignment is that you develop a mostly working implementation of your project as it was outlined in your proposal. What exactly that is depends on what your project is, but whatever the outcome of this assignment, it should run and it really work. It might still not have all the features you want, but it should have most; and it should definitely be recognizable as the product you had set out to develop.

Deliverables

Please turn in a gzip compressed tarball of your assignment; the filename should be the filename should be cs211-assign-8-teamcode.tar.gz with teamcode replaced by the code assigned to your team for your repository and your mailing list. The tarball should contain no derived files whatsoever (i.e. no executable files), but allow building all derived files. In particular, make sure you don't submit all those .svn folders from your repository! Include a README file that briefly explains what your programs do and contains any other notes you want us to check out before grading. We expect that your Makefile handles "the usual" targets like clean and test aside from all (which is the main way we will build your program). Include other "common" files such as INSTALL describing how to install your tool, CREDITS to pay your respects to the people whose code you're reusing, and LICENSE to describe copyright and distribution terms if you feel like it. You can look at any number of "famous" open source projects to see what kind of structure is appropriate; gif2png is a relatively small example, but you don't need everything in there. Aside from your code, what you really need is a README and a Makefile that works. :-)

Grading

For reference, here is a short explanation of the grading criteria. Packaging refers to the proper organization of the stuff you hand in, following the guidelines for Deliverables above. Style refers to C programming style, including things like consistent indentation, appropriate identifiers, useful comments, suitable documentation, etc. Simple, clean, readable code is what you should be aiming for. Performance refers to the amount of resources your program needs to produce the required results; this can include space, time, and other metrics. Design refers to proper modularization and the proper choice of algorithms and data structures; often this can be judged by asking "How hard would it be to add feature X?" and "How hard is it to replace algorithm X with algorithm Y?". Functionality refers to your programs being able to do what they should according to the specification given above; if the specification is ambiguous and you had to make a certain choice, defend that choice in your README file; if the specification is too general and you had to add certain restrictions, defend those in your README file as well.

If your programs cannot be built on ugradx.cs.jhu.edu you will get no points whatsoever. If your programs cannot be built without warnings using gcc -ansi -pedantic -Wall -Wextra -std=c99 -O we will take off 10% (except if you document a very good reason). If your programs cannot be built using make we will take off 10%. If your programs fail miserably even once, i.e. terminate with an exception of any kind or dump core, we will take off 10%. Finally, make sure to include your name and email address in every file you turn in!