CPSC 233: Common Problems With Submitted Assignments

Documentation [General documentation guide] [A1 specification documentation marking list: provides more details such as authorship information and what program features means]

• No documentation at all.

• No version control [How to demonstrate some sort of versioning system - tied to assignment features].

• Common things excluded or not fully completed by students in their documentation: contact information, listing program limitations when applicable, listing program features (JT's comment: you can even copy paste or paraphrase features right out of the assignment). Some students provided incorrect information such as tutorial: Again here is a list of the tutorials and instructors. You can find out which tutorial you are registered in by checking your winter 2021 schedule in the university portal).

• Over documenting code e.g. int age; //Declares an integer variable named age. (On top of this the markers indicate that in some cases this was done for each instruction in the program).

Stylistic issues

• Not following naming conventions. Explanations and examples of these naming conventions can be found in many parts of the lecture notes. For a quick example of how classes and methods are named look at Java's API for class String.
  • Using small letter for class names (e.g. manager instead of Manager)
  • The first letter identifiers, such as methods names, use capital letters (e.g. GameBegin instead of gameBegin)
• Methods that were overly long and not broken into smaller methods.
• Poor often non-self descriptive names used for identifiers such as variables e.g. lowAtt, medAtt, dtp...
• Inclusion of "dead codes". (JT's explanation: this typically refers to instructions that execute but whose results are never used such as variables being declared that are never used or it can refer to instructions that will never execute at run time).
• Constructors were not used to initialize attributes. This is a universal stylistic convention for Object-Oriented languages.