Week 8 [Mon, Aug 9th] - Project

Functionality Expectations

You will get full marks for implementation effort if you meet the expectation stated above. There are no extra marks for exceeding that bar. You are better off spending that effort in improving other aspects of the project. Try to avoid adding more features than necessary, unless you are doing it out of interest. As mentioned elsewhere, a functionality just the right size and of high quality will earn more marks than a functionality bigger (or more difficult, or more interesting/novel) but of lower quality.

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: 1 or more pages
  • DG: 3 or more pages
• 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 2 types of UML diagrams in your DG updates i.e., diagrams you added yourself or those you modified significantly.

Individual Expectations on Testing

Individual Expectations on Teamwork

• Expectation Do an equal share of the team-tasks.

• Expectation Carry an equal share of project roles and responsibilities.

• Expectation Review each others work. Reason: reviewing skills is a learning outcome, and it is mutually beneficial.

Team Expectations

• Expectation Preserve product integrity i.e. ensure,
  1. features fit together to form a cohesive product,
  2. documentation follows a consistent style and presents a cohesive picture to the reader, and
  3. final project demo presents a cohesive picture to the audience.
• Expectation Maintain product quality i.e. prevent breaking other parts of the product as it evolves. Note that bugs local to a specific feature will be counted against the author of that feature. However, if a new enhancement breaks the entire product, the whole team will have to share the penalty.
• Expectation Manage the project i.e. ensure workflow, code maintenance, integration, releases, etc. are done smoothly.

tP Workflow

Read our reuse policy (in Admin: Appendix B), in particular, how to give credit when you reuse code from the Internet or classmates:

 

Set Git user.name: We use various tools to analyze your code. For us to be able to identify your commits, we encourage you to set your Git user.name in all computers you use to a sensible string that uniquely identifies you. For example, you can set it to your GitHub username or your full name. If this user name is not set properly or if you use multiple usernames for Git, our grading scripts might miss some of your work.

After installing Git in a computer, you can set the Git username as follows:

1. Open a command window that can run Git commands (e.g., Git bash window)
2. Run the command git config --global user.name YOUR_GITHUB_USERNAME (omit the --global flag to limit the setting to the current repo only)
   e.g., git config --global user.name JohnDoe

More info about setting Git username is here.

 

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 with the -reused suffix)
  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 code 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 for evaluating 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 profile picture.
  • 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.

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

1. Setting up the GitHub team org/repo
2. Necessary general code enhancements
3. Setting up tools e.g., GitHub, Gradle
4. Maintaining the issue tracker
5. Release management
6. Updating user/developer docs that are not specific to a feature e.g. documenting the target user profile
7. 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 Developer Guide (Extracts): Reproduce the parts in the Developer Guide that you wrote. Alternatively, you can show the various diagrams you contributed.
• OPTIONAL Contributions to the User Guide (Extracts): Reproduce the parts in the User Guide that you wrote.

PPP Format

• File name (i.e., in the repo): docs/team/githbub_username_in_lower_case.md e.g., docs/team/goodcoder123.md
• Follow the example in the AddressBook-Level3

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.

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 considered as bugs and will count against your project score. Again, use the conversion technique given above to ensure links in the PDF files work.

Try the PDF conversion early. If you do it at the last minute, you may not have time to fix any problems in the generated PDF files (such problems are more common than you think).

PPP Page Limit

Content	Recommended	Hard Limit
Overview + Summary of contributions	0.5-1	2
[Optional] Contributions to the User Guide	1
[Optional] Contributions to the Developer Guide	3

• 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.

Follow the forking workflow in your project at least until (and including) v1.0 (you may tweak the workflow v2.0 onwards).

• Protect the master branch: You can use GitHub's Protected Branches feature to protect your master branch against rogue PRs. We suggest the following:

  • Go the the settings of your team repo.
  • Click on the Branches option on the navigation menu on the left.
  • Click the Add rule button. In the Branch protection rule page,
    • Specify the Branch name pattern to be master
    • Tick the option Require status checks to pass before merging to ensure that a branch has to pass CI before it can be merged into the master branch
    • If you think all PRs should be reviewed by someone other than the PR author before they are merged, also tick the Require pull request reviews before merging option.

• Create issues to represent project tasks so that they can be tracked using the issue tracker features.

• Create a PR when you implement a project task that updates the code. Remember to use a separate branch for each PR.
  You can use GitHub's draft PRs feature to indicate that a PR is not yet ready for merging.
  

• Get team members to review PRs. A workflow without PR reviews is a risky workflow.

  • Follow the Best practices for reviewing PRs @SE-EDU/guides.
    PRO TIP LGTM is common abbreviation you can use in the review comments to mean Looks Good To Merge.

• Go breadth-first iterative: As you are expected to follow breadth-first iterative approach, almost all code additions to the master branch should take the product from a working version to a slightly better working version.

  • Bad Let's add all data classes first reason: this is the depth-first approach
  • Bad Let's finish the part of the code that saves and loads data first reason: this is the depth-first approach
  • Good Let's add code to support simple todo tasks first (i.e., read, delete, save, load)

• Do not merge PRs failing Continuous Integration e.g., GitHub ActionsCI. The CI status of a PR is reported at the bottom of the conversation tab of the PR page. Here's an example:
  

  • If there is a failure, you can click on the Details link in corresponding line to find out more about the failure. Once you figure out the cause of the failure, push the a fix to the PR.

• After merging a PR,

  • close the corresponding issue.
    PRO TIP You can use GitHub's Fixes #123 trick to get the issue to close automatically when the PR is merged.
  • sync your repos with the team rep by pulling the latest master from the team repo and pushing it to your own fork.

• As you add functionality, update the input.txt and EXPECTED.txt as well so that the functionality you add gets regression tested automatically every time the code is updated from that point onwards.

Project Management → Revision Control →

Forking flow

In the forking workflow, the 'official' version of the software is kept in a remote repo designated as the 'main repo'. All team members fork the main repo and create pull requests from their fork to the main repo.

To illustrate how the workflow goes, let’s assume Jean wants to fix a bug in the code. Here are the steps:

1. Jean creates a separate branch in her local repo and fixes the bug in that branch.
   Common mistake: Doing the proposed changes in the master branch -- if Jean does that, she will not be able to have more than one PR open at any time because any changes to the master branch will be reflected in all open PRs.
2. Jean pushes the branch to her fork.
3. Jean creates a pull request from that branch in her fork to the main repo.
4. Other members review Jean’s pull request.
5. If reviewers suggested any changes, Jean updates the PR accordingly.
6. When reviewers are satisfied with the PR, one of the members (usually the team lead or a designated 'maintainer' of the main repo) merges the PR, which brings Jean’s code to the main repo.
7. Other members, realizing there is new code in the upstream repo, sync their forks with the new upstream repo (i.e. the main repo). This is done by pulling the new code to their own local repo and pushing the updated code to their own fork.
   Possible mistake: Creating another 'reverse' PR from the team repo to the team member's fork to sync the member's fork with the merged code. PRs are meant to go from downstream repos to upstream repos, not in the other direction.

• A detailed explanation of the Forking Workflow - From Atlassian

Tools → Git and GitHub →

Forking workflow

You can follow the steps in the simulation of a forking workflow given below to learn how to follow such a workflow.

This activity is best done as a team.

Step 1. One member: set up the team org and the team repo.

1. Create a GitHub organization for your team. The org name is up to you. We'll refer to this organization as team org from now on.

2. Add a team called developers to your team org.

3. Add team members to the developers team.

4. Fork se-edu/samplerepo-workflow-practice to your team org. We'll refer to this as the team repo.

5. Add the forked repo to the developers team. Give write access.

Step 2. Each team member: create PRs via own fork.

1. Fork that repo from your team org to your own GitHub account.

2. Create a branch named add-{your name}-info (e.g. add-johnTan-info) in the local repo.

3. Add a file yourName.md into the members directory (e.g., members/jonhTan.md) containing some info about you into that branch.

4. Push that branch to your fork.

5. Create a PR from that branch to the master branch of the team repo.

Step 3. For each PR: review, update, and merge.

1. [A team member (not the PR author)] Review the PR by adding comments (can be just dummy comments).

2. [PR author] Update the PR by pushing more commits to it, to simulate updating the PR based on review comments.

3. [Another team member] Approve and merge the PR using the GitHub interface.

4. [All members] Sync your local repo (and your fork) with upstream repo. In this case, your upstream repo is the repo in your team org.

Step 4. Create conflicting PRs.

1. [One member]: Update README: In the master branch, remove John Doe and Jane Doe from the README.md, commit, and push to the main repo.

2. [Each team member] Create a PR to add yourself under the Team Members section in the README.md. Use a new branch for the PR e.g., add-johnTan-name.

Step 5. Merge conflicting PRs one at a time. Before merging a PR, you’ll have to resolve conflicts.

1. [Optional] A member can inform the PR author (by posting a comment) that there is a conflict in the PR.

2. [PR author] Resolve the conflict locally:

   1. Pull the master branch from the repo in your team org.
   2. Merge the pulled master branch to your PR branch.
   3. Resolve the merge conflict that crops up during the merge.
   4. Push the updated PR branch to your fork.

3. [Another member or the PR author]: Merge the de-conflicted PR: When GitHub does not indicate a conflict anymore, you can go ahead and merge the PR.

tP Issue Tracker Setup

We recommend you configure the issue tracker of the tP team repo as follows:

• Delete existing labels and add the following labels.
  Issue type labels are useful from the beginning of the project. The other labels are needed only when you start implementing the features.

• Create following milestones : v1.0, v2.0, v2.1

• You may configure other project settings as you wish. e.g. more labels, more milestones

tP Project Schedule Tracking

In general, use the issue tracker (Milestones, Issues, PRs, Tags, Releases, and Labels) for assigning, scheduling, and tracking all noteworthy project tasks, including user stories. Update the issue tracker regularly to reflect the current status of the project. You can also use GitHub's Projects feature to manage the project, but keep it linked to the issue tracker as much as you can.

Using Issues:

• Record each of the user stories you plan to deliver as an issue in the issue tracker. e.g.,

• Assign the type.* and priority.* labels to those issues.

• Formalize the project plan by assigning relevant issues to the corresponding milestone.

• Define project tasks as issues. When you start implementing a user story (or a feature), break it down to smaller tasks if necessary. Define reasonable sized, standalone tasks. Create issues for each of those tasks so that they can be tracked.

  • A typical task should be small enough for one person to do in a few hours. eg.,

    • Bad (reasons: not a one-person task, not small enough): Write the Developer Guide
    • Good: Update class diagram in the Developer Guide for v2.1

  • There is no need to break things into VERY small tasks. Keep them as big as possible, but they should be no bigger than what you are going to assign a single person to do within a week. eg.,

    • Bad:Implementing parser  (reason: too big).
    • Good:Implementing parser support for adding of floating tasks

  • Do not track things taken for granted. e.g., push code to repo should not be a task to track. In the example given under the previous point, it is taken for granted that the owner will also (a) test the code and (b) push to the repo when it is ready. Those two need not be tracked as separate tasks.

  • Write a descriptive title for the issue. e.g. Add support for the 'undo' command to the parser

    • Omit redundant details. In some cases, the issue title is enough to describe the task. In that case, no need to repeat it in the issue description. There is no need for well-crafted and detailed descriptions for tasks. A minimal description is enough. Similarly, labels such as priority can be omitted if you think they don't help you.
      
      

• Assign tasks (i.e., issues) to the corresponding team members using the assignees field. Normally, there should be some ongoing tasks and some pending tasks against each team member at any point.