Objectives:

• Evaluate your manual testing skills, product evaluation skills, effort estimation skills
• Peer-evaluate your product design , implementation effort , documentation quality
  • Note that significant project components are not graded solely based on peer ratings. Rather, PE data are mostly used to cross-validate tutors' grades and identify cases that need further investigation. When peer inputs are used for grading, they are usually combined with tutor evaluations with appropriate weight for each. In some cases ratings from team members are given a higher weight compared to ratings from other peers, if that is appropriate.
• Do note that the PE is not a means of pitting you against each other. Developers and testers play for the same side; they need to push each other to improve the quality of their work -- not bring down each other.

Grading:

• Your performance in the practical exam will be considered for your final grade (under the QA category and under Implementation category, about 10 marks in total).
• You will be graded based on your effectiveness as a tester (e.g., the percentage of the bugs you found, the nature of the bugs you found) and how far off your evaluation/estimates are from the evaluator consensus. Explanation: we understand that you have limited expertise in this area; hence, we penalize only if your inputs don't seem to be based on a sincere effort to test/evaluate.
• The bugs found in your product by others will affect your v1.4 marks. You will be given a chance to reject false-positive bug reports.

Preparation:

• Similar to PE-Dry run

Phase 1: Testing / bug reporting

When, where: Week 13 lecture

Testing

1. Take note of your team to test. It will be given to you by the teaching team (distributed via LumiNUS gradebook).
2. Download from LumiNUS all files submitted by the team (i.e. jar file, User Guide, Developer Guide, and Project Portfolio Pages) into an empty folder.
3. [60 minutes] Test the product and report bugs as described below:

Product evaluation

[Remainder of the session] Evaluate the following aspects. Note down your evaluation in a hard copy (as a backup). Submit via TEAMMATES. You are recommended to complete this during the PE session but you have until the end of the day to submit (or revise) your submissions.

• A. Product Design []:
  Evaluate the product design based on how the product V2.0 (not V1.4) is described in the User Guide.

  • unable to judge: You are unable to judge this aspect for some reason e.g., UG is not available or does not have enough information.
  • target user specified and appropriate: The target user is clearly specified, prefers typing over other modes of input, and not too general (should be narrowed to a specific user group with certain characteristics).
  • value specified and matching: The value offered by the product is clearly specified and matches the target user.
  • value: low: The value to target user is low. App is not worth using.
  • value: medium: Some small group of target users might find the app worth using.
  • value: high: Most of the target users are likely to find the app worth using.
  • feature-fit: low: Features don't seem to fit together.
  • feature-fit: medium: Some features fit together but some don't.
  • feature-fit: high: All features fit together.
  • polished: The product looks well-designed.

• B. Quality of user docs []:
  Evaluate based on the parts of the user guide written by the person, as reproduced in the project portfolio. Evaluate from an end-user perspective.

  • UG/ unable to judge: Less than 1 page worth of UG content written by the student or cannot find PPP
  • UG/ good use of visuals: Uses visuals e.g., screenshots.
  • UG/ good use of examples: Uses examples e.g., sample inputs/outputs.
  • UG/ just enough information: Not too much information. All important information is given.
  • UG/ easy to understand: The information is easy to understand for the target audience.
  • UG/ polished: The document looks neat, well-formatted, and professional.

• C. Quality of developer docs []:
  Evaluate based on the developer docs cited/reproduced in the respective project portfolio page. Evaluate from the perspective of a new developer trying to understand how the features are implemented.

  • DG/ unable to judge: Less than 0.5 pages worth of content OR other problems in the document e.g. looks like included wrong content.
  • DG/ too little: 0.5 - 1 page of documentation
  • DG/ types of UML diagrams: 1: Only one type of diagram used (types: Class Diagrams, Object Diagrams, Sequence Diagrams, Activity Diagrams, Use Case Diagrams)
  • DG/ types of UML diagrams: 2: Two types of diagrams used
  • DG/ types of UML diagrams: 3+: Three or more types of diagrams used
  • DG/ UML diagrams suitable: The diagrams used for the right purpose
  • DG/ UML notation correct: No more than one minor error in the UML notation
  • DG/ diagrams not repetitive: Same diagram is not repeated with minor differences
  • DG/ diagrams not too complicated: Diagrams don't cram too much information into them
  • DG/ diagrams integrates with text: Diagrams are well integrated into the textual explanations
  • DG/ easy to understand: The document is easy to understand/follow
  • DG/ just enough information: Not too much information. All important information is given.
  • DG/ polished: The document looks neat, well-formatted, and professional.

• D. Feature Quality []:
  Evaluate the biggest feature done by the student for difficulty, completeness, and testability. Note: examples given below assume that AB3 did not have the commands edit, undo, and redo.

  • Feature/ difficulty: unable to judge: You are unable to judge this aspect for some reason.
  • Feature/ difficulty: low: e.g. make the existing find command case insensitive.
  • Feature/ difficulty: medium: e.g. an edit command that requires the user to type all fields, even the ones that are not being edited.
  • Feature/ difficulty: high: e.g., undo/redo command
  • Feature/ completeness: unable to judge: You are unable to judge this aspect for some reason.
  • Feature/ completeness: low: A partial implementation of the feature. Barely useful.
  • Feature/ completeness: medium: The feature has enough functionality to be useful for some of the users.
  • Feature/ completeness: high: The feature has all functionality to be useful to almost all users.
  • Feature/ not hard to test: The feature was not too hard to test manually.
  • Feature/ polished: The feature looks polished (as if done by a professional programmer).

• E. Amount of work []:
  Evaluate the amount of work, on a scale of 0 to 30.

  • Consider this PR (history command) as 5 units of effort which means this PR (undo/redo command) is about 15 points of effort. Given that 30 points matches an effort twice as that needed for the undo/redo feature (which was given as an example of an A grade project), we expect most students to be have efforts lower than 20.
  • Count all implementation/testing/documentation work as mentioned in that person's PPP. Also look at the actual code written by the person.
  • Do not give a high value just to be nice. If your estimate is wildly inaccurate, it means you are unable to estimate the effort required to implement a feature in a project that you are supposed to know well at this point. You may lose marks if your estimate is wildly inaccurate

Phase 2: Developer response phase

Duration: The review period will start around 1 day after the PE (exact time to be announced) and will last until the following Tuesday midnight. However, you are recommended to finish this task ASAP, to minimize cutting into your exam preparation work.

Bug reviewing is recommended to be done as a team as some of the decisions need team consensus.

Instructions for Reviewing Bug Reports

• First, don't freak out if there are lot of bug reports. Many can be duplicates and some can be false positives. In any case, we anticipate that all of these products will have some bugs and our penalty for bugs is not harsh. Furthermore, it depends on the severity of the bug. Some bug may not even be penalized.

• CATcher does not come with a UG, but the UI is fairly intuitive (there are tool tips too). Do post in the forum or ask in slack if you need any guidance with its usage.
• Also note that CATcher hasn't been battle-tested for this phase, in particular, w.r.t. multiple team members editing the same issue concurrently. It is ideal if the team members get together and work through the issues together. If you think others might be editing the same issues at the same time, use the Sync button at the top to force-sync your view with the latest data from GitHub.

Launch CATcher, and login to the profile CS2113/T PE. It will show all the bugs assigned to your team, divided into three sections:

1. Issues Pending Responses - Issues that your team has not processed yet.
2. Issues Responded - Your job is to get all issues to the second category.
3. Faulty Issues - e.g., Bugs marked as duplicates of each other, or causing circular duplicate relationships. Fix the problem given so that no issues remain in this category.

Respond to the bug reports shown.

Issues created for PE-D and PE need to be in a precise format for our grading scripts to work. Incorrectly-formatted responses will have to discarded. Therefore, you are strongly recommended to use CATcher for PE-D and PE activities. If you want to give your response via GitHub instead, please get our permission first.

• Go to the dev-response issue tracker
• Use tutorial.* and team.* labels to filter bug reports your team received.
• Do not edit the subject or the description. Your response (if any) should be added as a comment.
• Add a comment using the following exact template.

  # Team's Response
  {replace this with your response}
  ## Duplicate status (if any):
  

  Here is an example:

  # Team's Response
  
  Yes this is a bug. But it is a duplicate.
  * Changed the bug type because this is just a bug in the UG.
  * Lowered the severity because users can still use the feature.
  ## Duplicate status (if any):
  Duplicate of #67
  

• Do not close the bug report after you are done processing it.
• Use the exact Duplicate of #123 format to indicate duplicates.
• There should be exactly one comment per issue. If there are multiple comments, the last one will be taken for processing.

• If a bug seems to be for a different product (i.e. wrongly assigned to your team), let us know ASAP (email prof).

• If the bug is reported multiple times,

  • Mark all copies EXCEPT one as duplicates of the one left out (let's call that one the original) using the duplicate tag.
  • If the duplicates have different severity levels, you should keep the one with the highest severity as the original. But you can downgrade the severity of the original or the duplicates.
  • For each group of duplicates, all duplicates should point to one original i.e., no multiple levels of duplicates, and no cyclical duplication relationships.
  • If the duplication status is eventually accepted, all duplicates will be assumed to have inherited the type.* and severity.* from the original.

• Apply exactly one of these labels (if missing, we assign: response.Accepted)

Response Labels:

• response.Accepted: You accept it as a bug.
• response.NotInScope: It is a valid issue but not something the team should be penalized for e.g., it was not related to features delivered in v1.4.
• response.Rejected: What tester treated as a bug is in fact the expected behavior. The may lose marks for rejecting a bug without an explanation or using an unjustifiable explanation.
• response.CannotReproduce: You are unable to reproduce the behavior reported in the bug after multiple tries.
• response.IssueUnclear: The issue description is not clear. Don't post comments asked the tester to give more info. The tester will not be able to see those comments because the bug reports are anonymized.

• Apply exactly one of these labels (if missing, we assign: type.FunctionalityBug)

Bug Type Labels:

• type.FeatureFlaw: some functionality missing from a feature delivered in v1.4 in a way that the feature becomes less useful to the intended target user for normal usage. i.e., the feature is not 'complete'. In other words, an acceptance testing bug that falls within the scope of v1.4 features. These issues are counted against the 'depth and completeness' of the feature.
• type.FunctionalityBug: the bug is a flaw in how the product works.
• type.DocTypo: A minor spelling/grammar error in the documentation. Does not affect the user.
• type.DocumentationBug: A flaw in the documentation that can potentially affect the user e.g., a missing step, a wrong instruction

• If you disagree with the original severity assigned to the bug, you may change it to the correct level, in which case add a comment justifying the change. All such changes will be double-checked by the teaching team.

Bug Severity labels:

• severity.Low : A flaw that is unlikely to affect normal operations of the product. Appears only in very rare situations and causes a minor inconvenience only.
• severity.Medium : A flaw that causes occasional inconvenience to some users but they can continue to use the product.
• severity.High : A flaw that affects most users and causes major problems for users. i.e., makes the product almost unusable for most users.

• Decide who should fix the bug. Use the Assignees field to assign the issue to that person(s). There is no need to actually fix the bug though. It's simply an indication/acceptance of responsibility. If there is no assignee, we will distribute the penalty for that bug (if any) among all team members.

  • If it is not easy to decide the assignee(s), we recommend (but not enforce) that the feature owner should be assigned bugs related to the feature, Reason: The feature owner should have defended the feature against bugs using automated tests and defensive coding techniques.

• As far as possible, choose the correct type.*, severity.*, and assignees even for bugs you are not accepting or for bugs that are marked as duplicates. Reason: your non-acceptance or duplication status may be rejected in a later phase, in which case we need to grade it as an accepted/non-duplicate bug.

• Justify your response. For all of the following cases, you must add a comment justifying your stance. Testers will get to respond to all those cases and will be double-checked by the teaching team in later phases. Indiscriminate/unreasonable dev/tester responses, if deemed as a case of trying to game the system, will be penalized.
  • downgrading severity
  • non-acceptance of a bug
  • changing the bug type
  • non-obvious duplicate

At the end of the project each student is required to submit a Project Portfolio Page.

• Objective:

  • For you to use  (e.g. in your resume) as a well-documented data point of your SE experience
  • For us to use as a data point to evaluate your,
    • contributions to the project
    • your documentation skills

• Sections to include:

  • Overview: A short overview of your product (can use the product introduction you wrote earlier) to provide some context to the reader.

  • Summary of Contributions:

    • Code contributed: Give a link to your code on Project Code Dashboard, which should be https://nuscs2113-ay1920s1.github.io/dashboard/#=undefined&search=github_username_in_lower_case (replace github_username_in_lower_case with your actual username in lower case e.g., johndoe). This link is also available in the Project List Page -- linked to the icon under your photo.
    • Features implemented: A summary of the features you implemented. If you implemented multiple features, you are recommended to indicate which one is the biggest feature.
    • Other contributions:
      • Contributions to project management e.g., setting up project tools, managing releases, managing issue tracker etc.
      • 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

  • Relevant descriptions/terms/conventions: Include all relevant details necessary to understand the document, e.g., conventions, symbols or labels introduced by you, even if it was not introduced by you.

  • Contributions to the User Guide: Reproduce the parts in the User Guide that you wrote. This can include features you implemented as well as features you propose to implement.
    The purpose of allowing you to include proposed features is to provide you more flexibility to show your documentation skills. e.g. you can bring in a proposed feature just to give you an opportunity to use a UML diagram type not used by the actual features.

  • Contributions to the Developer Guide: Reproduce the parts in the Developer Guide that you wrote. Ensure there is enough content to evaluate your technical documentation skills and UML modelling skills. You can include descriptions of your design/implementations, possible alternatives, pros and cons of alternatives, etc.

  • If you plan to use the PPP in your Resume, you can also include your SE work outside of the module (will not be graded)

• Format:

  • File name: [TEAM_ID]-[Your Name]PPP.pdf e.g., [AY1920S1-CS2113T-F10-3][John Doe]PPP.pdf

  • Use one-half spacing between the lines for legibility

  • Follow this example. A PDF version of the same has been uploaded on LumiNUS.

  • 💡 You are free to choose any (collaborative) software to write the documents. However, try to follow the format of the sample user guide, developer guide and PPP given.

  • Do note that extra effort is needed in duplicating and maintaining consistency across UG/DG and PPP. This is a cost of not using automated document generation.

  • It is assumed that all contents in the PPP were written primarily by you. If any section is written by someone else  e.g. someone else described the feature in the User Guide but you implemented the feature, clearly state that the section was written by someone else  (e.g. Start of Extract [from: User Guide] written by Jane Doe).  Reason: Your writing skills will be evaluated based on the PPP

• Page limit:

  Content	Limit
  Overview + Summary of contributions	0.5-1 (soft limit)
  Contributions to the User Guide	2-4 (soft limit)
  Contributions to the Developer Guide	3-5 (soft limit)
  Total	5-8 (strict)

  • Reason for page limit: These submissions are peer-graded (in the PE) which needs to be done in a limited time span.
    

  • If you have more content than the limit given above, you can give a representative samples of UG and DG that showcase your documentation skills. Those samples should be understandable on their own. For the parts left-out, you can give an abbreviated version and refer the reader to the full UG/DG for more details.
    

  • It's similar to giving extra details as appendices; the reader will look at the UG/DG if the PPP is not enough to make a judgment. For example, when judging documentation quality, if the part in the PPP is not well-written, there is no point reading the rest in the main UG/DG. That's why you need to put the most representative part of your writings in the PPP and still give an abbreviated version of the rest in the PPP itself. Even when judging the quantity of work, the reader should be able to get a good sense of the quantity by combining what is quoted in the PPP and your abbreviated description of the missing part. There is no guarantee that the evaluator will read the full document.