Every programming assignment that you submit should be accompanied by an overview document.
Format. You should format an overview document as either ASCII text (with lines at most 80 characters long), HTML, or PDF. The filename must be overview.*, where * is the appropriate extension. Use good taste in formatting your document; the course staff values simplicity and readability over fancy graphic design. The typical length of an overview document should be two to four letter-sized pages, with 10–12 point font and reasonable margins. Use good judgment about what will be useful to the course staff while grading your assignment: incomplete and excessive documentation will both be penalized.
An overview document should be structured as described below. You may omit sections that you find to be irrelevant for your assignment. The suggested word length of each section is a guideline, not a requirement.
edu.cornell.cs.cs4120.testing.
Summarize the most noteworthy aspects of the rest of your overview. Anything you mention here should be described in more detail later in the document. You might include:
Sometimes you will need to resolve ambiguities or inconsistencies in the language specification or in an interface specification.
Describe your finished specification. Identify the choices you made in finishing the specification, and provide a rationale for them. It might be useful to discuss alternatives you considered, why you rejected them, and the tradeoffs involved in your ultimate choice. If you made any changes to the given specification, justify why a change was needed and why the result of your change is reasonable.
Your job is to convince the course staff that your finished specification is reasonable and in the spirit of the assignment. If you are not convincing, the staff may deduct points.
Discuss how you created a program that satisfies the assignment specification. This includes topics such as:
Your job is to give the course staff enough information that we can understand your program, without needing to look at the source code, and to convince us that you thought carefully about the construction of your program.
Though the course staff may sometimes provide some test cases for you; it is almost always a mistake to think that those test cases are complete. The course staff often has a reserve of tricky test cases that your code will be tested against. So spend time designing your own test cases. Don't wait until the last minute—do it early in the assignment, even before you've written any code.
Remember, also, that testing should not be something you do after finishing coding; rather, you should be testing your program incrementally as it is developed.
Describe and evaluate your test plan, and discuss any interesting issues that arose during the design of your test plan. Why do you have confidence that your test cases have enough coverage of the input space, and enough coverage of your code? Do your test cases accomplish both unit testing and integration testing? Include pointers to your tests.
Describe the results of carrying out your test plan on your program. Which of your test cases pass, and which fail? If any of your tests fail, be sure to include a discussion of why you think they fail in the known problems section.
Claimed test case results that cannot be reproduced with your submitted code will be severely penalized and might even be an academic integrity violation. Never "fix up" the output of your program.
Your job is to convince the course staff that you exercised due diligence in validating your program.
Detail any known problems with your specification, design, or implementation. Problems that are clearly identified and described here will be looked upon more favorably than problems that the course staff discovers on its own. Are there bugs in your program? Missing functionality? Incorrect specifications? Incorrect documentation in the code? Let us know.
Express your opinions about the assignment. This section of the overview document will not be graded, but it can earn good karma. You might address such questions as: