Apdx C: FAQ

The Weekly Schedule Page presents all you need to know in chronological order (for each week) while the other pages have some of the same content organized by topic.

The Weekly Schedule Page is the one page you need to refer weekly. Although there is a lot of content in the Admin Info page and the Textbook page -- which you are welcome to read in those respective pages -- the same content is also cross-embedded in the corresponding weekly schedule pages. Such cross-embedded extracts usually appear in expandable panels and can be identified by the symbol in the panel title.

Same content, same assessments, same exam. Separate tutorials, separate grading. Unless specified otherwise, whatever is stated for one course applies to the other.

In CS2103/T, A+ is not given simply based on the final score. To get an A+ you should,

• score enough to be close to the higher end of the A grade band.
• be considered technically competent by peers and tutor (based on peer evaluations and tutor observations).
• be considered helpful by peers (based on peer evaluations and tutor observations).
• In particular, you are encouraged to be active on the forum and give your inputs to ongoing discussions so that other students can benefit from your relatively higher expertise that makes you deserve an A+.
• Whenever you can, go out of your way to review pull requests created by other team members.

Sometimes, small things matter in big ways. e.g., all other things being equal, a job may be offered to the candidate who has the neater looking CV although both have the same qualifications. This may be unfair, but that's how the world works. Students forget this harsh reality when they are in the protected environment of the school and tend to get sloppy with their work habits. That is why we reward all positive behavior, even small ones (e.g., following precise submission instructions, arriving on time etc.).

But unlike the real world, we are forgiving. That is why you can still earn full marks for participation even if you miss a few things here and there.

We have a separate website because some of the course information does not fit into the structure imposed by Canvas.

Slides are not meant to be documents to print and study for exams (the textbook is the resource more suitable for exam prep). Their purpose is to support the briefing delivery and keep you engaged during the briefing. That's why our slides are less detailed and more visual.

Defining your own unique project is more fun.

But, wider scope → more diverse projects → harder for us to go deep into your project. The collective know-how we (i.e., students and the teaching team) have built up about SE issues related to the project become shallow and stretched too thinly. It also affects fairness of grading.

That is why a strictly-defined project is more suitable for a first course in SE that focuses on nuts-and-bolts of SE. After learning those fundamentals, in higher level project courses you can focus more on the creative side of software projects without being dragged down by nuts-and-bolts SE issues (because you already know how to deal with them). However, we would like to allow some room for creativity too. That is why we let you build products that are slight variations of a given theme.

Also note: The freedom to do 'anything' is not a necessary condition for creativity. Do not mistake being different for being creative. In fact, the more constrained you are, the more you need creativity to stand out.

We have chosen a basic set of tools after considering ease of learning, availability, typical-ness, popularity, migration path to other tools, etc. There are many reasons for limiting your choices:

Pedagogical reasons:

• Sometimes 'good enough', not necessarily the best, tools are a better fit for beginners: Most bleeding edge, most specialized, or most sophisticated tools are not suitable for a beginner course. After mastering our toolset, you will find it easy to upgrade to such high-end tools by yourself. We do expect you to eventually (after this course) migrate to better tools and, having learned more than one tool, to attain a more general understanding about a family of tools.
• We want you to learn to thrive under given conditions: As a professional Software Engineer, you must learn to be productive in any given tool environment, rather than insist on using your preferred tools. It is usually in small companies doing less important work that you get to chose your own toolset. Bigger companies working on mature products often impose some choices on developers, such as the project management tool, code repository, IDE, language etc. For example, Google used SVN as their revision control software until very recently, long after SVN fell out of popularity among developers. Sometimes this is due to cost reasons (tool licensing cost), and sometimes due to legacy reasons (because the tool is already entrenched in their codebase). While programming in school is often a solo sport, programming in the industry is a team sport. As we are training you to become professional software engineers, it is important to get over the psychological hurdle of needing to satisfy individual preferences and get used to making the best of a given environment.

Practical reasons:

• Some of the topics are tightly coupled to tools. Allowing more tools means tutors need to learn more tools, which increases their workload.
• We provide learning resources for tools. e.g. 'Git guides'. Allowing more tools means we need to produce more resources.
• When all students use the same tool, the collective expertise of the tool is more, increasing the opportunities for you to learn from each others.

Meanwhile, feel free to share with peers your experience of using other tools.

The high number of submissions is not meant to increase workload but to spread it across the semester. Learning theory and applying them should be done in parallel to maximize the learning effect. That can happen only if we spread theory and 'application of theory' (i.e., project work) evenly across the semester.

In addition, spreading the work across the semester aligns with the technique that we apply in this course to increase your retention of concepts learned.

CS2103T communication requirements are limited to a very narrow scope (i.e., communicate about the product to users and developers). CS2101 aims to teach you technical communication in a much wider context. While you may be able to reuse some of the stuff across the two courses, submission requirements are not intended to be exactly the same.

While we are aware that Java 21 is a more recent LTS version of Java, we are sticking with Java 17 for the time being. We plan to move to Java 21 in a future semester when its adoption is sufficiently high.

In most quizzes, answers will be released within a day after the quiz deadline.

On a related note, if you are not confident about the answer you've selected for a question, you are welcome to discuss it in the forum, even if the submission deadline is not over yet (but one question per thread please).

Adding a git tag in the iP is a self-declaration that you think you are done with the iP increment. We take your word for it. We don't check the code to see if you have actually done the said increment. Therefore, it is just a mechanism for you to self-declare progress and for us to monitor those progress declarations.

Go ahead and fix it in a subsequent commit. There is no need to update the previous commit or move the corresponding tag to the new commit. As we do not test your code at every tag, earlier bugs will not affect your grade as long as they are fixed eventually. Similarly, feel free to improve the code of previous increments later.

You can add the corresponding tags to the same commit.
Optionally, if you haven't pushed the commit to the fork yet, you can try to figure out how to split that commit into multiple commits.

You can add the corresponding tag to the earlier commit (or the latest commit -- it doesn't matter) and push the tag.

Not to worry. Just push the tags now. They will be detected by the dashboard at the next update. There is no penalty if mistakes are detected and fixed soon after.

It's OK; correct it now.

It's fine. Be more careful in the future. Your iP marks will not be affected for missing an occasional deliverable such as this one.

If you still want to make that branch-___ item green in the iP dashboard, you can simply create a branch with the required branch name, do some commits in it, and merge it to master. The dashboard will accept it as long as it has the right name and merged to the master branch.

Yes, provided it doesn't require the user to install another software.
Also note that in the team project, there is a project constraint that requires the data to be saved in a human editable format.

TLDR: In this course, tutor's main job is to deliver tutorials. Hence, tutors can answer questions related to (and arising from) the tutorial delivery. But they are not allowed to answer admin questions. They are not allowed to help with technical issues.

• Good I did not understand your explanation of that question. Why did you say "a b c"?
  Reason: This question is a follow-up from a tutorial discussion.
• Good This is how I understood coupling. Is that correct?
  Reason: This question shows you have put in some effort to learn the topic and seeking further clarification from the tutor.
• Bad What is coupling? | What is SLAP?
  Reason: These are concept covered in the textbook and other resources provided.
• Bad How will this be graded? | What happens if this submission is late?
  Reason: Tutors are not allowed to answer admin questions.
• Bad My program crashes with this error; what to do?
  Reason: Tutors are not allowed to help with technical issues (post your issue in the forum instead).

See the following course policy:

Our tutorial participation bar has enough of a buffer to allow an occasional absence (irrespective of the reason for absence). While we are not able to make special arrangements for absences due to reasons not accepted as valid by NUS (e.g., due to family event, interview, travel delays, overslept etc.), such absences are unlikely to affect your participation marks unless frequent.

• You are welcome to keep your tutor informed of such absences as a courtesy, but it is not a requirement.
• If you miss a tutorial, do try to catch up as best as you can e.g., by watching the tutorial recording.

In the past, many students have requested to increase the tutorial duration because a mere hour is barely enough to get through all the tutorial tasks. Increasing the tutorial time is not possible due to lack of venues and tutors. Instead, let's try to make the best of the one hour available by coming well-prepared and starting on time. Note that the better prepared you are, the higher the chance of completing all activities allocated to a tutorial within time.

• It is an opportunity to exercise your product design skills because optimizing the product to a very specific target user requires good product design skills.
• It minimizes the overlap between features of different teams which can cause plagiarism issues. Furthermore, higher the number of other teams having the same features, less impressive your work becomes especially if others have done a better job of implementing that feature.

The size of the target market is not a grading criterion. You can make it as narrow as you want. Even a single user target market is fine as long as you can define that single user in a way others can understand (reason: project evaluators need to evaluate the project from the point of view of the target users).

Yes. If the submission deadline is not over yet, use the same link to update the submission. If the submission deadline is over, email the updated name, target user, value proposition to cs2103@comp.nus.edu.sg.

In that case, at a later stage, you can add more user stories until there is enough for a meaningful work distribution. But at this point focus on selecting the smallest sub-set of must_have user stories only.

No, you should still include them. Reason: The existing implementation might still require some work before it fits your product.

Aim for the smallest set of features the product cannot do without. Even a most basic version of those features is enough. After completing that feature set, you can add more if there is time left.

Yes, even if you don't plan to change them.
Reason: To show that you have examined, understood, and agree with, the current behavior of those features.

However, you may omit existing AB3 feature that are not must-have, and hence, need not be included in the MVP.

The deadline for tP iterations is the Thursday 23:59 in the week it is due, unless a different date is specified in the instructions of that iteration.

We recommend that (when possible) the person allocated to perform the task should also create (and manage) the issue. This will help everyone practice this aspect of the project, and spread the workload among team members.

Yes (an example), although having too many non-coding tasks in the issue tracker can make it cluttered.

GitHub Issues does not have a direct way of doing this. However, you can use a task list in the issue description to indicate sub-tasks and corresponding issues/PRs -- (an example)

This is discouraged in the tP, as it makes task allocations (and accountability) harder to track.
Instead, shared tasks can be split into separate issues. For example, instead of creating an issue Update teams page with own info and assigning it to all team members (in which case, this issue can't be closed until all members do their part), you can create issues such as Update teams page with John's info that can be assigned to individual members.

A: In the tP (in which our grading scripts track issues assigned to each member), it is better to create separate issues so that each person's work can be tracked separately. For example, suppose everyone is expected to update the User Guide (UG). You can create separate issues based on which part of the UG will be updated by which person e.g., List-related UG updates (assigned to John), Delete-related UG updates (assigned to Alice), and so on.

This is encouraged, while not a strict rule. Creating an issue indicates 'a task to be done', while a PR is 'a task being done'. These are not the same, and there can be a significant time gap between the two.
Furthermore, posting an issue in advance allows the team to,

• anticipate a PR is coming
• discuss more about the task (in the issue thread) e.g., alternatives, priority
• indicate who will be doing the task (by adding an assignee), when it should be done (by adding it to a milestone)

It is up to the team to decide. However, we discourage unilateral PR merging i.e., you create and merge PRs without any reviews/oversight from others, unless the PR is trivial changes.

The DG is primarily meant to help current/future developers. Therefore, decide based on how the inclusion/exclusion affects that target audience (you belong to the target audience too!).

You are welcome to add new content/diagrams, but it is not a strict requirement. Consider costs (e.g., the effort required to add and maintain new content) vs benefits (how much the new content helps future developers) and decide accordingly. However, everyone is expected to contribute to the DG, which means you should divide the DG-update work among team members.

Not surprisingly, a common question tutors receive is "can you look at our project and tell us if we have done enough to get full marks?". Here's the answer to that question:

The tP effort is graded primarily based on peer judgements (tutor judgements are used too). That means you will be judging the effort of another team later, which also means you should be able to make a similar judgement for your own project now. While we understand effort estimating is hard for software projects, it is an essential SE skill, and we must practice it when we can.

The expected minimum bar to get full marks for effort is given here.

If you surpass the above bars (in your own estimation), you should be in a good position to receive full marks for the effort. But keep in mind that there are many other components in the tP grading, not just the effort.

Yes, if it requires each member to put in about a half an iP worth of effort.

Not necessarily. It depends on the effort required, which in turn depends on what the code does. It is quite possible for 100 LoC that implements feature X to take more effort than 300 LoC that implements feature Y (i.e., it depends on the context). So, we measure the effort, not LoC (LoC figure given is just a rough estimate of the equivalent effort).

There is no such guarantee, for two reasons:

1. Your implementation effort is graded based on how much functionality your team produced (based on peer-testers' and tutors' estimates) and how much of that work was contributed by you (based on team members' estimates). For example, simply copy-pasting 400+ LoC with only minor modifications is unlikely to meet this bar as it is less than an effort equivalent to writing a typical 300-400 LoC (or half of a typical iP effort).
2. Implementation marks are based on both effort and quality, the latter being the primary driver (more info here). So, meeting the effort bar doesn't guarantee full marks for implementation.

As it is the case with other similar tP requirements, there is no penalty for missing this expectation occasionally. But try not to miss it too often.

In very early iterations, try to keep the existing tests (and CI) working. It is optional to add more tests.

In general, there are several options you can choose from:

1. Update/add tests every time you change functional code. This is what normally happens in stable production systems. For example, most OSS projects will not accept a PR that has failing tests or not enough new tests to cover the new functional code.
2. Disable failing tests temporarily until the code is stable. This is suitable when the functional code is in a highly volatile state (e.g., you are still experimenting with the implementation). The benefit is that you avoid the cost of writing tests for functional code that might change again soon after. Some costs: (a) harder to detect regressions during the period tests are disabled (b) testing work pile up which could distort your estimate of real progress (c) forgetting to enable the tests in time
   This is still a viable option during some stages of a tP e.g., during the early part of an iteration, or while a PR is still in 'draft' state (i.e., for getting early feedback from the team).
3. Decide certain tests are not worth the effort to maintain, and delete them permanently. Result: Less test code to maintain but higher risk of undetected regressions.

In general, it is better for a PR to update code, tests, and documentation together.

In early iterations, it is fine not to update documentation, to keep things simple. We can start updating docs in a later iteration, when the code is more stable.

Here are some reasons:

• We want you to take at least two passes at documenting the project so that you can learn how to evolve the documentation along with the code (which requires additional considerations, when compared to documenting the project only once).
• It is better to get used to the documentation tool chain early, to avoid unexpected problems near the final submission deadline.
• It allows receiving early self/peer/instructor feedback.

In terms of effort distribution, it's up to the team to tell us who did how much. Same goes for assigning bugs. So, it's fine for someone to take over a feature if the team is able to estimate the effort of each member, and they have a consensus on who will be responsible for bugs in that feature.
For code authorship, only one person can claim authorship of a line, and that person will be graded for the code quality of that line. By default, that will be the last person who edited it (as per Git data) but you can override that behavior using @@author tags.