cs445 - Spring 2020

Before you get started

This class requires you to do a LOT of work between homeworks (3 or 4), reading assignments, reading the textbooks, a pretty large project, and two exams.

Grading is quite strict as well, in that failure to get a passing grade in, say, the project will earn you a failing grade in this class. Put it another way, you cannot get around work by skipping assignments and hoping to pass based on a good class average.

Hours

Books

Textbook(s)

[1] Head First Object-Oriented Analysis & Design, Brett D. McLaughlin, Gary Pollice & David West, Addison Wesley, ISBN: 0-596-00867-8

Other books

Grading

• Homeworks: 15%
• Midterm: 20%
• Final: 30%
• Project: 35%

Late Work

Exceptional circumstances

Your teacher will try to accommodate you in those cases that are beyond your control, such as medical and personal emergencies. Please note that, based on circumstances, the teacher may decide to assign you an incomplete grade, "I", or otherwise ask you to drop the class.

Incomplete ("I") Grades

Academic Honesty

All the work you submit must be individual, including, but not limited to, those cases when your instructor has approved pair-programming for you; in these cases the only thing that may be identical with somebody else's is code.

Academic dishonesty will not be tolerated. IIT has a strict academic honesty policy; here are the top points:

1. The misrepresentation of any work submitted for credit as the product of a student’s sole independent effort, such as using the ideas of others without attribution and other forms of plagiarism.
2. The use of any unauthorized assistance in taking quizzes, tests or examinations.
3. The acquisition, without permission, of tests, answer sheets, problem solutions or other academic material when such material has been withheld from distribution by the instructor.
4. Deliberate harmful obstruction of the studies, research or academic work of any member of the IIT community.
5. Making material misrepresentation in any submission to or through any office of the university to a potential employer, professional society, meeting or organization.
6. The intentional assistance of others in the violation of the standards for academic honest.

Extra Credit

There are multiple ways you can receive extra credit in this class, here are some:

• Take class notes: scan them and return them to your instructor after each class in PDF format. If you take notes electronically, then turn in to your instructor a copy of your notes, .txt, .odf, .doc, .pdf formats ok.
  • Maximum extra credit: 5 points that will be added to the average class score (scale from one to 100)
  • If you want to get this extra credit, then you'll have to commit to turning in notes for each class.
  • In addition, your instructor will have to confirm upfront that you are eligible for this extra credit since only one student in class can get it.
• Identify errors in the project definition, e.g. typos, wrong commands, conflicting statements, etc, and submit a suggestion for how it should be corrected. Extra credit depends on how significant your find is.
• Recommend new projects or homeworks for this class. Your recommendation should be original and non-trivial. If you're not sure what original and non-trivial mean, then talk to your instructor.
• Extra credit: 5 points per accepted recommendation. All extra credit will be added to your average class score (scale from one to 100).
• Recommend problems to be included in the midterm or final. You'll get credit for submitting a good problem. Your submission should be original and non-trivial.
• Extra credit: 4 points per accepted recommendation. All points you earn for your recommendations will be added to your average class score (scale from one to 100).
• The credit will be doubled for each problem that's included in the exam.

Exams

Exams are open-book(s), open-notes and comprehensive. You may bring with you any notes you want, however you may not share them with anybody else during the exam.

During the exam the use of communication devices such as phones and computers is not allowed. You may bring with you a calculator if you think you need one.

Programming Language(s)

Test Environment

Unit Testing

We're all tired of bad software, whether because it crashes when we least expect it or because of security holes that allow the bad guys to take over our systems and identities. We all pretty much despise software maintenance, in particular when we're asked to modify code that we never touched, don't really understand, and have no way of making sure our changes don't damage existing functionality.

The good news is that we can do something about it: creating automated unit tests for all your code is a very good start. Doing it in Test-Driven Development (TDD) fashion is even better.

You cannot possibly get full credit for your work unless each and every method in your classes has good unit testing. By good we mean meaningful and sufficient:

• A unit-test that just asserts true is not meaningful.
• Providing only one unit test for a method that requires multiple tests is not sufficient.

You will be required to measure and include with your deliverables the unit test coverage as measured by the tool of choice in your chosen programming language.

As a general rule automated unit testing will account for 50% of your mark in any assignment, of which 3/5 is assigned to unit test coverage, and the other 2/5 will be awarded based on how good your tests are.

If you fail to submit unit testing, then you cannot expect to get more than 50% in the assignment.

Unit test coverage above 80% is required for full credit. Unit test coverage below 50% doesn't earn you any credit. For anything in between, you get one percentage point of credit for each percentage point of unit test coverage. For example, if your test coverage is 73%, then the most credit you can get for unit testing is 30-(80-73)=23. In another example, if the unit test coverage is 51%, then the most credit you can get is 30-(80-51)=1.

Unit tests that are useless will be removed and the coverage will be measured again before a mark is assigned for your work.

The other 20 percentage points for unit test coverage will be equally spread between the methods of your code. If you fail to write any unit test for a method, then you lose the corresponding percentage points; we will have discretion to give you less than full credit if you haven't written enough unit-tests for a method. For example, if your code has 10 methods across three (3) classes, then you get 20/10=2 percentage points of credit for unit tests written per each method. Another way to look at this is to say that you lose two (2) percentage points for each method that doesn't have any unit test.

Communications

Typically the first person you should contact for any questions related to assignments is your TA.

Please be descriptive in the subject line when you email your instructor such that processing doesn't get delayed. At the very minimum you should indicate the class and the term, followed by a brief description of what is it that you want to communicate.

Examples of good subject lines for your email:

• cs445, Spring 2020 - Hw1, part (i)
• cs445, Spring 2020 - When will the grades be posted on the Blackboard?
• cs445, Spring 2020 - Question about project

Assignment Submission

You are required to submit your work online, using the Blackboard. Late work will be accepted, however it is subject to the late penalties described in this syllabus.

Here are the requirements:

Project

The purpose of the project is to give you the opportunity to practice the concepts discussed in this class. The requirements are purposely somewhat vague such that you can interact with the client (that's your instructor) to figure out the detailed requirements.

Class Schedule

Important Events

Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)

Reasonable accommodations will be made for students with documented disabilities. In order to receive accommodations, students must obtain a letter of accommodation from the Center for Disability Resources. The Center for Disability Resources (CDR) is located in 3424 S. State St., room 1C3-2 (on the first floor).

Varia

Unless otherwise stated all papers you turn in will be TYPED. No handwritten work is accepted.

Each page will have a header as follows:

• The left side: your name
• Middle: page number and the total number of pages (ex. 2/5 indicates this is page 2 out of a total of 5)
• Right hand side: name of the assignment (ex. Homework #2)

Each page will also have a footer:

• The left hand side will contain the following text: cs445-section: Spring 2020 where section stands for the section you are in.
• The right hand side will contain the following text: Illinois Institute of Technology - Computer Science