6.031 — Software Construction
Fall 2019

Announcements Archive

Tue Dec 17: Project grades and final grades

Project grades and feedback from your TA are now available on Omnivore, and final letter grades should be available soon on WebSIS.

Have a great IAP!

Tue Dec 10: Project, reflection, and last class

The group project is due tomorrow at 11am. Also due at 11am is your individual reflection about the project, so please don’t forget to fill that out.

Tomorrow is the last 6.031 class of the semester. We will have a brief wrap-up and summary of the course.

Wed Dec 4: Quiz 2 grades

Quiz 2 grades are now available on Omnivore.

You can review your graded quiz on Gradescope. You will receive an email from Gradescope, and if you haven’t used it in another class, the email will explain how to log in.

Quiz 2 solutions are posted on the web site.

As with all assignments, please bring grading issues or questions to instructor office hours. Gradescope has a “regrade request” feature, but we will not be using it.

Fri Nov 22: Problem Set 4 grades

Overall ps4 grades and grade reports are now available on Omnivore.

To see your beta autograde report, go to Didit, follow the link to your psets/ps4 page, and click “beta milestone.”

Your manual grade was assigned by staff inspection of your specs, tests, implementations, thread safety docs, and your response to code reviews.

If you have questions, please see the FAQ about grading questions.

Wed Nov 20: Problem Set 4 reflection

Now that you’ve completed (2-slack-day-takers, will soon complete) the last problem set, please fill out the required Problem Set 4 reflection, which asks a few questions about how you worked on ps4. It should take only a minute to fill out, and is due by Sunday at 10pm.

Tue Nov 19: Quiz 2 coming up in two weeks

Quiz 2 will be on Tuesday, December 3, 7:35pm - 8:25pm, in Walker 3rd floor gym.

Note that Quiz 2 is an evening quiz, not during class time. And note that the quiz is only 50 minutes long, despite being an evening quiz. Because this quiz is in the evening, the usual classtime is cancelled on the previous day, Mon Dec 2. Project checkins with TAs will not happen that day, and 6.031 staff members will not be in 34-101 during the class hour. Lab hours will happen that day as usual, as shown on the course calendar.

The quiz will cover readings 1-27, from the start of the semester to last week’s classes on Little Languages. Any and all concepts from readings 1-27 may appear on the quiz. Quizzes from previous semesters of 6.031 can be found in the quiz archive, although their content may differ a bit from the topics we’ve discussed this semester.

The quiz is on paper, so you will not need your laptop. It is closed-book, closed-notes, but you may bring a single 8.5×11″ double-sided page of notes, readable without a magnifying glass. The notes must be created by you, not anybody else, since the process of creating a crib sheet is most of the learning benefit of it.

A quiz review will be held during class time on Wed Nov 27 (with no TA project checkins that day either). As always, you can visit lab & office hours to ask quiz review questions, or post on Piazza.

Sun Nov 17: Project groups and handout

Your project team and mentor for the group project are posted on Omnivore. The project handout has also been posted.

In tomorrow’s class, after we take a nanoquiz and practice team version control with Git, you will meet with your team, check in with your TA mentor, create your group repo, write a team contract, and start working on the project. The team contract is due tomorrow night, and a warmup iteration of the project is due next Monday.

You must check in with your TA mentor tomorrow and in every class during the project.

  • On Fri Nov 22, you will check in after a short class that includes our last nanoquiz.
  • Wed Nov 27 is a quiz review, no required check-in.
  • Mon Dec 2 is cancelled due to Quiz 2 the following evening, no required check-in.

All other class time until the last day of classes will be devoted to working on the project.

Fri Nov 15: Problem Set 4 alpha reports

Alpha grade reports and code reviews for ps4 are now available.

  • To see your alpha autograde report, go to Didit, follow the link to your psets/ps4 page, and click “alpha milestone.”
  • To see your code reviews, go to Caesar and click on “ps4-alpha” under “submitted assignments.”

In autograding this iteration, many test cases were zero points because the focus was on situations without concurrency.

In manual grading, staff looked at your Board abstraction function and rep exposure safety argument. As you revise, try to both address their comments directly and generalize the feedback to improve your other ADTs.

The ps4 beta deadline is Monday at 10pm. Make sure you address all your code review comments from humans or marked #important by Checkstyle. If you need a slack day, remember to request it on Caesar.

Please ask questions on Piazza and visit lab or office hours.

Wed Nov 13: Problem Set 4 code review open, due Friday 11am

Problem Set 4 code reviewing is now open. Go to Caesar to find your reviewing assignments.

You’ll have 6 files to review this time, and the first one in your list will again be a “practice” review, with code written by the staff rather than by another student. The instructions in that task have more information about what this means.

As usual, the Code Reviewing page has guidelines and instructions. Remember that your classmates are people like you who are trying hard like you. Be nice.

Code reviews are due on Friday morning.

Sat Nov 9: Project group signup

Starting next Monday, you will be working on the 6.031 final project in groups of three people. Please fill out the project signup form by this Wednesday Nov 13 at 10pm.

Fill out the form right now, even if you don’t have a group of three: just choose the appropriate option on the form. You can resubmit another response if your plans change by Wednesday night, and we will use your last submitted response. To find additional group members, use the Piazza teammates post.

Every member of a group must submit the form. If you do not fill out the form, you will not be part of a group. We will assume you have dropped the course.

As always, if you have any questions, ask on Piazza!

Fri Nov 8: Problem Set 3 grades

Overall ps3 grades and grade reports are now available on Omnivore.

To see your beta autograde report, go to Didit, follow the link to your psets/ps3 page, and click “beta milestone.”

Your manual grade was assigned by staff inspection of your specs, ADT documentation, tests, implementation, and your response to code reviews.

If you have questions, please see the FAQ about grading questions.

Mon Nov 4: Problem Set 4

Problem Set 4 is now available. Because there are no classes on Monday, the ps4 alpha deadline is Tuesday, November 12, at 10pm, and you may extend it by at most one slack day only.

After you wrap up ps3, please fill out the required Problem Set 3 reflection, which asks a few questions about how you worked on ps3. It should take only a minute to fill out, and is due by this Thursday at 10pm.

Fri Nov 1: Problem Set 3 alpha reports

Alpha grade reports and code reviews for ps3 are now available.

  • To see your alpha autograde report, go to Didit, follow the link to your psets/ps3 page, and click “alpha milestone.”
  • To see your code reviews, go to Caesar and click on “ps3-alpha” under “submitted assignments.”

In autograding, your Expression type and Commands methods were tested against staff tests.

In manual grading, staff looked at your Expression datatype definition, the specs of some Expression operations, and the implementation of one variant. As you revise, try to both address their comments directly and generalize the feedback to improve your other specs and implementations.

The ps3 beta deadline is Monday at 10pm. Make sure you address all your code review comments from humans or marked #important by Checkstyle. If you need a slack day, remember to request it on Caesar.

Please ask questions on Piazza and visit lab or office hours.

Wed Oct 30: Problem Set 3 code review open, due Friday 11am

Problem Set 3 code reviewing is now open. Go to Caesar to find your reviewing assignments.

You’ll have 6 files to review this time, and the first one in your list will again be a “practice” review, with code written by the staff rather than by another student. The instructions in that task have more information about what this means.

As usual, the Code Reviewing page has guidelines and instructions. Remember that your classmates are people like you who are trying hard like you. Be nice.

Code reviews are due on Friday morning.

Mon Oct 28: Quiz 1 grades

Quiz 1 grades are now available on Omnivore.

You can review your graded quiz on Gradescope. You will receive an email from Gradescope, and if you haven’t used it in another class, the email will explain how to log in.

Quiz 1 solutions are posted on the web site.

As with all assignments, please bring grading issues or questions to instructor office hours. Gradescope has a “regrade request” feature, but we will not be using it.

Mon Oct 21: Problem Set 2 grades

Reminder: Quiz 1 is Wednesday at 11am in Walker 3rd floor gym.

Overall ps2 grades and grade reports are now available on Omnivore.

To see your beta autograde report, go to Didit, follow the link to your psets/ps2 page, and click “beta milestone.”

Your manual grade was assigned by staff inspection of your implementations, tests, and your response to code reviews.

Problem Set 2 code review included a “practice” review task. Visit your Caesar dashboard and open that practice task to see a staff-written feedback comment – look on line 31.

If you have questions, please see the FAQ about grading questions.

Wed Oct 16: Problem Set 3

Problem Set 3 is now available. The ps3 alpha deadline is Monday, October 28, at 10pm.

After you wrap up ps2, please fill out the required Problem Set 2 reflection, which asks a few questions about how you worked on ps2. It should take only a minute to fill out, and is due by this Saturday at 10pm.

Fri Oct 11: Quiz 1 in less than two weeks

Quiz 1 will be on Wednesday, October 23, 11:05am-11:55am, in Walker 3rd floor gym. That’s the usual class time, but not the usual class location.

The quiz is 50 minutes long, so class will end early that day.

The quiz will cover readings 1-15, from the start of the semester to Wednesday’s class on equality. Any and all concepts from readings 1-15 may appear on the quiz. Quizzes from previous semesters of 6.031 can be found in the quiz archive, although their content may differ a bit from the topics we’ve discussed this semester.

The quiz is on paper, so you will not need your laptop. It is closed-book, closed-notes, but you may bring a single 8.5×11″ double-sided page of notes, readable without a magnifying glass. The notes must be created by you, not anybody else, since the process of creating a crib sheet is most of the learning benefit of it.

A quiz review will be held during class time on Mon Oct 21, and as always, you can visit lab & office hours to ask quiz review questions, or post on Piazza.

Fri Oct 11: Problem Set 2 alpha reports

Alpha grade reports and code reviews for ps2 are now available.

  • To see your alpha autograde report, go to Didit, follow the link to your psets/ps2 page, and click “alpha milestone.”
  • To see your code reviews, go to Caesar and click on “ps2-alpha” under “submitted assignments.”

In autograding, your implementations were tested against staff tests, and your IntervalSet & MultiIntervalSet tests were tested using correct and incorrect staff implementations.

In manual grading, staff looked only at your RepMap- and RepList­IntervalSet AFs and RIs. As you revise, try to both address their comments directly and generalize the feedback to improve your other ADTs.

The ps2 beta deadline is Wednesday at 10pm due to the holiday. Make sure you address all your code review comments from humans or marked #important by Checkstyle. If you need a slack day, remember to request it on Caesar.

Please ask questions on Piazza and visit lab or office hours.

Wed Oct 9: Problem Set 2 code review open, due Friday 11am

Problem Set 2 code reviewing is now open. Go to Caesar to find your reviewing assignments.

You’ll have 6 files to review this time, but the first one in your list will be a “practice” review, with code written by the staff rather than by another student. The comment in that file has more information about what this means.

As usual, the Code Reviewing page has guidelines and instructions. Remember that your classmates are people like you who are trying hard like you. Be nice.

Code reviews are due on Friday morning.

Fri Oct 4: Problem Set 1 grades

Overall ps1 grades and grade reports are now available on Omnivore.

To see your beta autograde report, go to Didit, follow the link to your psets/ps1 page, and click “beta milestone.”

Your manual grade was assigned by staff inspection of your test suites, Deduplicate spec, and your response to code reviews.

If you have questions, please see the FAQ about grading questions.

Mon Sep 30: Problem Set 2

Problem Set 2 is now available. The ps2 alpha deadline is next Monday at 10pm.

After you wrap up ps1, please fill out the required Problem Set 1 reflection, which asks a few questions about how you worked on ps1. It should take only a minute to fill out, and is due by this Thursday at 10pm.

Fri Sep 27: Problem Set 1 alpha reports

Alpha grade reports and code reviews for ps1 are now available. As before:

  • To see your alpha autograde report, go to Didit, follow the link to your psets/ps1 page, and click “alpha milestone.”
  • To see your code reviews, go to Caesar and click on “ps1-alpha” under “submitted assignments.”

In autograding, your implementations were tested against staff tests, and your tests were tested using correct and incorrect staff implementations.

At the Omnivore link above, you will see staff comments about your toBucketSets testing strategy, but not about your other test suites. As you revise, try to both address those comments on toBucketSets and generalize the feedback to improve your other test suites.

The ps1 beta deadline is Monday at 10pm. Make sure you address all your code review comments from humans or marked #important by Checkstyle. Checkstyle’s comments also appear in Eclipse, both as yellow highlights in the code and in the Problems tab. Pay attention to warnings!

If you need a slack day or two, remember to make the request in advance on Caesar.

Good work on a challenging problem set, and good luck on the beta! Please ask questions on Piazza and visit lab or office hours.

Wed Sep 25: Problem Set 1 code review open, due Friday 11am

Problem Set 1 code reviewing is now open. Go to Caesar to find your reviewing assignments. You’ll have 10 files to review.

Please see the Code Reviewing page for guidelines and instructions. Remember that your classmates are people like you who are trying hard like you. Be nice.

Code reviews are due on Friday morning.

Fri Sep 20: Problem Set 0 grades

Overall ps0 grades and grade reports are now available on Omnivore.

To see your beta autograde report, go to Didit, follow the link to your psets/ps0 page, and click “beta milestone.”

Your manual grade was assigned by staff inspection of your personal art code and your response to code reviews.

If you have questions, please see the FAQ about grading questions.

If you did not submit a reflection, you must do that before your grades are made available (Omnivore will give you a link to the reflection page).

Wed Sep 18: ps1 erratum

As mentioned in today’s class, the starting code for PracticeTest.java has a bad example test: Practice.practice(0, ...) violates the precondition that day >= 1. Please discard this test case from your test suite.

Mon Sep 16: Problem Set 1

Problem Set 1 is now available. The ps1 alpha deadline is next Monday at 10pm.

After you wrap up ps0 (due tonight), please fill out the required Problem Set 0 reflection, which asks a few questions about how you worked on ps0. It should take only a minute to fill out, and is due by Thursday at 10pm.

Fri Sep 13: Problem Set 0 alpha reports

Alpha grade reports and code reviews for ps0 are now available.

  • To see your alpha autograde report, go to Didit, follow the link to your psets/ps0 page, and click “alpha milestone.”
  • To see your code reviews, go to Caesar and click on “ps0-alpha” under “submitted assignments.”

In autograding, your submission was tested both by the public tests that were shown to you and by hidden tests. If you failed any hidden tests, you’ll see the name of the test that failed and a stack trace of where it failed. The test case inputs or code will not be revealed to you, either by Didit or by staff. The hidden tests are like bug reports from users in the field, where you get a rough idea of what the user was trying to do (the test name) and a stack trace of where the failure occurred. You need to figure out what’s wrong with your code from those clues.

You should revise ps0 for the beta deadline on Monday at 10pm. You can take slack on this deadline using Caesar, just like the alpha deadline.

Your revised version of ps0 should fix any bugs found by the hidden tests, and you must address each of your code review comments made by humans or marked #important by the Checkstyle automatic style checker, as described in the code reviewing guidelines. You can also run Checkstyle yourself.

See the problem set handout for a breakdown of approximately how your overall ps0 grade will be calculated.

Good luck! Please ask questions on Piazza and visit lab or office hours.

Wed Sep 11: Problem Set 0 code review open, due Friday 11am

Problem Set 0 code reviewing is now open. Go to Caesar to find your reviewing assignments. You’ll have 3 files to review. (Problem Set 0 is a relatively short problem set; code reviews on future problem sets will involve more files.)

Please see the Code Reviewing page for guidelines and instructions. Remember that your classmates are people like you, who are trying hard, like you. Be nice.

Code reviews are due before class on Friday.

Tue Sep 10: Nanoquiz makeups and in-class programming feedback

A reminder that nanoquiz grades are posted on Omnivore shortly after the end of each class, at which point the 7 × 24-hour makeup period begins.

For example, if you plan to submit a makeup for nanoquiz 1, the deadline is tomorrow afternoon. See Nanoquiz Grading and Makeup for details.

Checkoffs and feedback on your work in class are also posted on Omnivore under each class.

For example, you can see feedback on exercises in class 3. Click “inclass-programming” and select a particular exercise to find a link to Constellation where you can see the code that was graded — for example, the partitioning exercise.

To see all in-class programming grades, go back up to “classes” and click “inclass-programming-grades.”

For grades where the lowest 5 are dropped, Omnivore requires that at least 5 grades remain after dropping. Once we reach the 6th reading, nanoquiz, etc., one lowest grade so far will be dropped. Drops are recomputed automatically whenever grades are added or changed. If you have a grading question, please bring it to instructor office hours.

Mon Sep 9: Problem Set 0 alpha due 10pm

Problem Set 0 alpha is due at 10pm tonight.

Remember that if you need an extension on a problem set iteration deadline, you must request it before your current deadline passes using Caesar, as described on the General Information page.

Wed Sep 4: Problem Set 0 and Getting Started

Problem Set 0 is now available.

For help getting started with Java, Eclipse, and Git: visit lab hours 7pm to 10pm in 32-044 on Thursday night. TAs and LAs will be there to help you install and set up the tools you need for 6.031.

You must have all the tools set up and ready before class at 11am on Friday. See Part I (problems 0 to 4) of ps0.

ps0 alpha is due Monday, September 9, at 10pm. ps0 beta will be due Monday, September 16. See the General Information page for a description of problem set submission deadlines.

If you need help with course material or programming in Java, please see the calendar of office and lab hours.

For almost all questions, Piazza is the place to ask. Once again, welcome to 6.031!

Wed Sep 4: Reading exercises and nanoquizzes

Welcome to 6.031!

In class today you completed some reading exercises in reading 1 and took a first nanoquiz. Your grades for the reading exercises and nanoquiz are now on Omnivore.

Reading 1 and reading 2 are online.

Reading exercises are due 10pm the evening before class, so reading 1 and 2 exercises are due at 10pm tomorrow.

In class on Friday we will take a nanoquiz on reading 2. Nanoquiz grades are posted at or soon after the end of class, at which point the 7 × 24-hour makeup period begins. See nanoquiz grading and makeup for details.

If you have questions, please ask on Piazza.

Tue Sep 3: Getting started in 6.031

Hello! 6.031 requires you to get up to speed quickly, setting up tools and learning the basics of Java. Get started here. Deadlines:

  • By 10pm Thursday night, you must complete the class 1 reading and class 2 reading, including programming exercises using the 6.031 Java Tutor in Eclipse.

  • By 11am Friday before class 2, you must complete all the exercises on the Getting Started page, and Part 1 of Problem Set 0. Problem Set 0 will be released tomorrow after class.

You can find these deadlines on the course calendar, plus lab hours where you can get help.

The only thing you need to do for the first class tomorrow is bring your laptop. It’s OK if it’s not set up with Java yet, and you don’t need to do reading 1 yet. If you did not receive our previous announcement, please keep reading…

Fri Aug 23: Welcome to 6.031!

You’re getting this message because you preregistered for 6.031. Welcome! A few announcements:

  1. In order to join the class properly, you must fill out this signup form. Please fill it out now. 6.031 gets rolling quickly, so you must fill out this form before the end of the first class meeting on Wed Sep 4, or else you won’t have access to the first problem set.

  2. 6.009 is a required prerequisite for this course. If you haven’t taken 6.009, you won’t be able to take 6.031 for credit, only as a listener.

  3. You will need to bring a laptop to every 6.031 class meeting, including the first meeting on Wed Sep 4. If you don’t have a laptop, IS&T can lend you one.

See you in September!