Tuesday, November 15, 2011

[IMPORTANT] SocialNet Extended with Private Test Release

It has turned out that the FrontDesk functionality of releasing hidden staff tests based on the quality of student tests was revived in the SocialNet assignment but not informed to all the students properly. I apologize for a late notice. Because of this confusion, we are extending the due date for the SocialNet assignment by 3 days. The new due date will be Nov. 20th 11:59PM. (A gentle reminder that I have office hours on Nov. 20th from 3:00PM-5:00PM, so please come by for a last minute help or debugging.)

Note that there are only 4 really basic public tests, and more complicated tests are hidden. If you wrote good JUnit tests and submitted them to FrontDesk, you would be able to release some private test results based on the quality of the tests you wrote. The button for this functionality can be found at the bottom of the submission result page as "Release Private Tests". Basically, it shows if there's any hidden test that your program fails. You can repeat fixing the problem and submitting the program again to see the result, but please be warned there is a limit in the number of tests that can be released in a day, and you can be banned for a while if you try to submit too many times within a short period of time.

As always, you must write your own robust test cases to make sure your program work correctly, and it is a part of the assignment. One general tip for writing good test cases is to try to come up with all the possible usage cases for the classes and the methods including edge cases like illegal arguments. If you are uncertain about how your program should behave for a certain situation, for example, write a JUnit test and submit it to see what happens against the staff code.