CS412/413
Introduction to Compilers
Spring 2001

About Programming Assignments

Grading

Your grade on a programming assignment will be based on the following criteria:

• Correctness: We will test your code rigorously against our test cases. The correctness of your implementation is important.
• Coding style: We ask that you follow the coding conventions and programming style described in the handout Notes on Programming Style. We hope that those rules will give you a good basis for developing a style of your own.
• Code organization: Your implementation should conform to the specification of the problem statement. In addition, we expect that your code is readable and well-written and that the design is clean and modular.
• Documentation: See the section on Documentation.
• Test cases: We will look at how thorough your test cases are in checking the correctness of your program.

Documentation

Date:
Group Number:
Team members:

1. Status of your project

Tell us whether your program works perfectly or not. If not, you should

• document exactly what you managed to get done and what you did not
• demonstrate the parts that work are indeed functioning correctly by providing a test case for each of them.

2. The high level structure of your code

Describe any classes/interfaces and data structures you used in your implementation. Express the relationship among the classes in the form of a diagram and show how the classes constitute a working component. You may also want to show us the control flow of the program. It should never be necessary for us to look at your code to understand how it works (as opposed to understanding how it is implemented). If you find that you have to read the code to understand a method or variable, then your description is inadequate.

3. Design choices

A working program is the result of many design decisions, which to a large extent determine the efficiency and extensibility of your implementation. However, these design decisions - how you break the problem into subproblems, why your code is organized this way, why this class or interface was introduced, what that method does - are usually not reflected in the final code, which consists of very low-level, detailed declarations and statements. Describe and justify all the design decisions (other than the ones we specified in the problem statement) you made along the way as well as the special features of your implementation.

4. Answers to questions

In some assignments, we will ask you to document certain details that are specific to the implementation.

5. Testing strategy/test cases

In software development, a large fraction of the time is spent on verifying the correctness of the software. Since techniques like formal methods are usually too expensive to use, software developers verify the correctness of their programs by performing an extensive testing on it. We expect you to design test cases that test your code well. Pay attention to corner cases and boundary conditions, because many errors show up there. Show us each test program you wrote and describe the aspect(s) of your code that each test case attempts to check.

6. Conclusion

Briefly tell us what you learn from the assignment. In particular, tell us

• the technical things you learned
• the amount of time you spent on the assignment
• the problems you encountered (e.g., cooperation among the group members, designing test cases, debugging, code integration)
• what mistakes the course staff made in running the assignment, if any

Submission