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CS156 Guide

About this document

The CS156 Guide is a guide for the teaching staff—instructors, graduate teaching assistants (TAs) and undergraduate learning assistants (LAs) for CMPSC 156, a software engineering course based on legacy code taught at UC Santa Barbara, and designed by Phill Conrad

The first version of the guide was initially authored by Andrew Lu, as part of his MS project, during the 2021-2022 academic year. It is maintained by Phill Conrad, and the staff (instructors, TAs and LAs) of CMPSC 156.

Outline

This is an outline of topics that are intended to be included in the guide, along with the completion status of each.

Legacy Code Projects

  • Choosing Legacy Code Projects (what do we look for?) Done
  • Tech Stack (current, how it has evolved, why) Done
  • Application Lifecycle
    • Development, QA, Production
  • How do we set it up? (demo-spring-react-example) Done
    • Staff setup before handoff to students
    • Branch protection rules
  • How do we migrate from one quarter to another? TODO
  • How do we come up with issues and epics? Done
  • How do we make use of starter stories? Done
  • How do we introduce legacy code projects to the students? TODO
  • What do we look for in pull requests for the legacy code projects?
    • Two reviews, one from another team member, one from staff Done
    • Detailed description with linked issue Done
  • Grading, Point System Done
    • Get to 100, points are 5, 10, or 20, depending on complexity of work Done
  • Common Pitfalls for students when approaching Legacy Code
    • Smaller, incremental PRs instead of one giant PR Done
    • Doing the wrong thing well - predictable outcomes Done
      • Students often write very good code but have a flawed understanding of what the issue at hand is actually for, so they write code that has to be thrown away Done

Services

  • GitHub
    • Organizations, Teams, and Initial Setup In Progress
    • Student Developer Pack (and Teacher Pack) In Progress
    • Legacy Code Project Repositories In Progress
    • Issues and Projects (Kanban Boards) In Progress
      • Talk about Projects Beta, how it could be incorporated? In Progress
    • Pull Requests TODO
    • Actions / Secrets TODO
    • Pages (static website hosting) In Progress
  • UCSB CS GitHub Linker (Anacapa)
    • Initial Setup
    • Team Importing (and what it affects)
    • Analysis Tools
    • Creating empty repositories for assignments
  • Heroku
    • Two-factor authentication
    • Setup of Heroku apps for CS 156 (production, QA)
    • Limitations of Heroku (credit cards, being on top of grading)
    • Postgres
  • Slack
    • Initial Setup
    • Channel Layout (and each channel’s purpose)
    • #help-lecture-discussion
    • Anacapa Slack Bot
  • Gradescope and Gauchospace
    • Initial Setup (production and staff instances)
    • Initial Student Emails
    • Team Imports
    • Assignment Templates
  • Testing
    • Unit Testing: JUnit and Jest
    • Mutation Testing: Pitest and Stryker
    • Codecov
      • Integration with GitHub, reports / checks that show up on pull requests
      • CODECOV_TOKEN, when you need it, how to set it up
      • Approving students
      • Common gotchas when setting up / using Codecov
        • Make sure the branch name is correct (main vs. master)
    • GitHub Actions (just link to above?)
  • Development Tools
    • VS Code
    • Swagger UI
    • Storybook
      • GitHub Pages deployments for QA and Prod
      • DOCS_TOKEN, how to set it up
    • MongoDB
      • How it’s currently being used, why choosing this over Postgres
      • Setting up a new MongoDB org for a class iteration
        • Invite first, student accepts, then introduce to team
    • UCSB Developer API
      • Where it’s used in our apps
      • Requesting an account, sharing keys

Teams and Team Formation (CATME)

  • Initial Survey for team formation
  • Section swaps
    • How to handle them
    • Procedure for students to request them
  • Periodic CATME Evaluation Surveys
    • Why do we do them?
    • How do they factor into a student’s grade?
  • Importing teams into GauchoSpace, GitHub Linker

The Course Website

  • Organization and Layout
    • Topics and Resource section
    • Labs, lectures, and homework list
    • Office Hours and Calendar
    • Team Member List
    • How to create / update all of the above
  • Software installation article
  • Creating a New Quarter on the website

Agile Workflows

  • General overview of Agile concepts, description of which concepts we implement as-is, description of concepts we modify to work in a short academic setting
  • Standups
    • How and when do we introduce?
    • How do we do them? (Posting on Slack for participation)
  • Retrospectives
    • How and when do we introduce?
    • How often do we do them? (After every team assignment)
    • How do we do them? (Stop / start / continue, retro Google doc and/or posting on Slack for participation)
  • Kanban Boards
    • link to GitHub Projects above?

Key Assignments

  • jpa00
    • Its purpose: getting started, ensuring students have working setups
  • jpa01
    • Its purpose: introduction to Java, unit testing, mutation testing
    • Discuss how to autograde mutation tests (look for no survived, ignore timeout)
  • jpa02 (first Heroku assignment)
    • Its purpose: introduce Heroku, get students to sign up and learn to deploy apps
    • Very small code changes
    • Discuss the autograder, how to autograde Heroku deployments
  • jpa03 (setting up OAuth)
    • Its purpose: introduce the concept of OAuth, secret key values, GitHub Actions
    • How to grade this assignment (manual, rubric, things to watch for)
  • team01
    • Its purpose: get students working on backend, creating REST APIs and working with external ones, introducing core git and GitHub concepts such as branching, kanban, pull requests
    • Grading: the autograder(s)
  • team02
  • team03
  • Take-Home Final
    • What goes on it? Interview-type questions that demonstrate learning from this course

Key In-Class Activities

  • Early Career Software Developers Paper
    • Its purpose: to motivate this class, establish the problem, get students to think ahead to what they will get out of this class
    • Individual reading assignment, then group discussion
  • Introductory Lecture Topics
    • A lecture on controllers, services, and Swagger UI
    • A lecture on unit and mutation testing
    • A lecture on React and component structure
    • A lecture on how to use Git branching and GitHub
  • #help-lecture-discussion Help Queue
    • How does it work? (students post, staff react with emoji)
      • Showing the queue in the classroom
    • Expectations of the help queue
      • Start by being very lenient, gradually encourage / enforce more complex questions, similar to industry
  • Brownfield Team Research
    • NSF Pre- and Post- Surveys
    • Informed Consent, how to introduce it
  • Product Management / Ownership Activity
    • Its purpose: introduce how user stories are made, where they come from, the concept of talking to customers to develop feature
    • Comes with a lesson on product management in industry
    • Deep dive into existing applications, come up with issues
    • Staff will aggregate into epics for students
  • Final Presentation Demos
    • Its purpose: provide a comprehensive overview of features that were worked on, establish a starting point for the next iteration of the class
    • Video submission on GauchoSpace
    • Video requirements, links to past videos

Timeline

  • A single-page document that links to other documents and provides a general timeline of when each thing should be introduced
  • List of activities for initial class setup (before the first lecture)

Staff Role

  • Link to other places in the document, but provide an overview of how the staff is expected to support the students as time progresses
  • A timeline for how to prepare and progress through the legacy code project
  • How to mentor teams
  • How to pick staff (?)

Uncategorized / Miscellaneous

  • How to use South Hall 1431
    • Benefits of the “active learning classrooms”
    • Table layout
    • How to use the lectern computer
  • Differences between this course and CMPSC 148
  • Suggestions for future work / tools