COMP2511 Notices

Some Final Words

Posted by Sai Nair Wednesday 22 May 2024, 09:29:11 AM.

Hey everyone!

Once again, great work on completing this course - you are hopefully one step closer to being great software developers! We have some special commendations to make as well. The top 10 students for this course are, in order:

1. Shree Baskar
2. Sam Hooper
3. Rachel Tang
4. Cyrus Cheng
5. Lachlan Ho
6. Uzman Zawahir
7. Maxwell Hogan
8. Mitchell Waghorn
9. Amy Tian
10. Dylan Liang

Congratulations to everyone for your great performance in the course. We hope you are also very proud of your efforts!

On another note, a big thank you also goes out to the tutors who consistently and tirelessly worked to improve the course experience for you all both in tutorials and behind the scenes (marking assignments in a timely manner, responding to forums quickly and running help sessions). A big thank you to my fellow admins Alvin, Amanda and Carl for helping with ensuring the smooth running of the course. They've been instrumental in ensuring both a good student experience as well as ensuring tutors have the best and easiest time in improving your experience.

Thanks once again and all the best in the coming term!

From the Ashesh and the admin team

Supplementary Exam

Posted by Alvin Cherk Wednesday 15 May 2024, 03:24:09 PM.

The COMP2511 (24T1) supplementary examination will be held on Wednesday the 22nd May from 9:30am to 12:45pm . The school should have sent you an email regarding this. Please send an email to the class account ( cs2511@cse.unsw.edu.au ) if you have not received such an email.

Please note that you can only take the supplementary exam if you are offered the supplementary exam.

Assignment-iii Marks Out

Posted by Alvin Cherk Saturday 11 May 2024, 05:29:11 PM.

Assignment-iii marks are out on sturec.

You can find them here: https://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~give/Student/give.php

If there are any issues, please email cs2511@cse.unsw.edu.au

Exam on Wednesday

Posted by Amanda Lu Monday 06 May 2024, 08:43:45 PM.

The big day is almost upon us!

We're sure you're aware, but the COMP2511 Final Exam is on Wednesday. You should have received an email about your corralling and seating arrangements, this information is also accessible at the following link: https://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~exam/24T1/seating/register.cgi/allocations/

Couple of quick reminders:

• Make sure you bring:
  • Your student ID card (or a driver's license/passport if you don't have a student ID card)
  • A pen
  • Clear water bottle
  • A good night's sleep!
• Make sure you know your exam seat/corralling allocation and your UNSW zPass before going in.
• Be on time to your exam or even a little early - UNSW policy is generally to not let latecomers in (!)
• You will have access to everything in this directory in the exam environment:
  • The lecture slides and code
  • The Java 17 API Spec
• Remember to submit your files before time is up ! We have reminders in the paper but make sure you submit as you go.

Best of luck, you got this 💪💪

COMP2511 Admin Team 🙌🙌

Week 12 Notices 🎆

Posted by Amanda Lu Wednesday 01 May 2024, 06:15:29 PM.

Hi all, hope exam study for this and your other courses is going well. Here are a small handful of notices - lots of this information is scattered around in different places, so I thought I'd consolidate it here.

Assignment II + III🎆

Assignment II marks have been released. Your feedback is on Gitlab as an issue or as a branch. If you have any questions about your manual marking please email your marker. If you applied for a rerun, it will be processed in the next 1-2 days.

There was a small display error with some of the names of tests in automarking, detailed in this Edstem post . This doesn't affect any marks.

Assignment 3 marks will be released sometime after the exam, but we can't provide a useful estimation of when yet.

Exam Content and Revision 🪟

There have been some questions about what is on the exam. Here is the brief answer:

• All content contained in the lectures could be examined as theory.
• You won't be asked to code anything that was not part of the tutorials or labs - e.g. we won't ask you to code up something like Facade Pattern.
• Anything not covered by lectures (e.g. material on external sites like Refactoring Guru that is not on lecture slides) won't be examined.
• There have also been some questions about the 40% hurdle. This will vary from student to student of course, but the exam hurdle is designed to be passable by the broad majority of students, especially if you are already on track to passing the course.

A previous term's revision lecture recording was posted yesterday on WebCMS.

A code smell Quizlet created by a student in a previous offering of the course has also been posted on Edstem . Do note, however, it contains some material that was not covered in lectures.

T hat should hopefully clear up some questions, but feel free to ask anything further on the forum or in the extra upcoming help sessions!

Revision Lecture Recording + Week 12 Help Sessions

Posted by Alvin Cherk Tuesday 30 April 2024, 11:58:46 AM.

Hi all,

The revision lecture recording from 23T3 can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdpXqcJrdXU . There were some audio issues in 24T1's recording. The 23T3 information is still relevant for this term's exam.

I have also added more help sessions in Week 12, you can find the times here

Extra help session today

Posted by Sai Nair Thursday 25 April 2024, 12:03:03 PM.

Hi everyone,

We're running an extra help session today for assignment 3 questions, as well as general content questions. Here is the link: Link to meeting .

Updates on End of Week 10 Updates 📊

Posted by Amanda Lu Monday 22 April 2024, 07:32:38 PM, last modified Monday 22 April 2024, 08:29:47 PM.

Hi all, as promised a small number of updates on the updates from last week!

Assignment II Automarking + Reruns 📊

...has been released and is on a Gitlab branch named "automarking". If you have any questions about your mark please make a private forum post.

If you feel you have a small mistake in one of your tasks, which requires a change of up to 20 lines, you can fill in this form to apply for a rerun. Note that in all cases there will be a penalty of 20% applied to the new performance mark for that given task. This includes if your code didn't compile beforehand.

For example, if your enemy goal did not compile, you may patch it (<=20 lines) on a separate branch called rerun in order to have it rerun, but you will be penalised 20% of your enemy goal performance mark. Your other marks will be unaffected.

Note we will not accept rerun requests after the 28th of April 11:59pm (this Sunday). We will also not be waiving rerun penalties unless it was an internal issue on our end regarding automarking or dryruns.

Revision exercises 🌀

You should have been granted an individual repo named " revision-exercises ", containing coding revision questions and the sample exam. Here is the link if the above link doesn't work:

https://nw-syd-gitlab.cseunsw.tech/COMP2511/24T1/s...

(replace z123456 with your own zID)

Exam Clashes ⚔️

We have sent emails about exam clashes. If you have a clashing exam and have not been contacted yet, please email the course account.

Have a good week and see you on Wednesday for the revision lecture :)

End of Week 10 Notices 🎵

Posted by Amanda Lu Saturday 20 April 2024, 08:11:51 PM.

Hi everyone, well done on reaching the end of Week 10!

🎺🥁MyExperience 🎷🎹

Please complete your MyExperience! We are sitting at 13% 😰 (yes - you, reading this message! Stop right now and fill it out!)

Your feedback goes a long way towards making changes to the course if you thought things needed improvement, and/or is a good way to show appreciation to your tutor if they helped you at all :)

Assignments 🎼

Assignment II marking has begun. We will notify you when automarking is complete and also release a rerun form, similarly to Assignment I. Manual marking will probably be completed by the start of Week 12.

Assignment III's official deadline has passed, but we will not be applying any late penalty until Tuesday 5pm . A gentle reminder though that any submissions past Friday Week 11 5pm will not be accepted.

Exam Revision Lecture 📹

The admin team is holding an exam revision lecture this coming Wednesday 1-4pm in Ainsworth 202 . There will not be an online stream but it will be recorded. I've heard students in previous terms have found it very useful, so see you all there!

Other Revision Materials 🐦

Here are all the revision materials available to you now or soon, in approximate order of significance:

• Revision lecture (see above)
• Reviewing previous tutorial and lab examples, including completing any that you previously missed
• Multiple choice and short answer revision exercises, previously made available here.
• Sample exam, completed in class or released at the end of this weekend
• Coding revision exercises, also released at the same time
• Choice labs (especially Lab05 and Lab08)
• Any other revision methods you would like

Enjoy your Stuvac and see you soon :)

Help Sessions Today and Tomorrow

Posted by Sai Nair Thursday 18 April 2024, 05:33:29 PM.

Hey everyone,

We've scheduled a couple of extra one hour online help sessions today and tomorrow (Thursday and Friday) from 6pm to 7pm dedicated to assignment 3 questions, as well as one online on Sunday from 4pm to 6pm. Hopefully these help you out as the term comes to a close :D

Monday Week 10 Lecture 📽️

Posted by Amanda Lu Monday 15 April 2024, 05:32:14 PM, last modified Wednesday 17 April 2024, 11:50:25 AM.

Hey all, here is the final lecture for the term if you missed it.

As mentioned many times in the video, please try to attend a session of the sample exam this week. If anyone has questions about the exam or anything else, please ask on the forums :)

End of Week 9 Updates 🙌

Posted by Amanda Lu Sunday 14 April 2024, 02:05:00 PM.

Welcome to the end of Week 9 everyone! There's just one last push left in the course. Here's this week's notices.

Assignments II + III 🌊

Congratulations to everyone for submitting for Assignment II! Our tutors will be calibrating marking and then marking soon - your marks for Assignment II will ideally be released near the end of Week 11.

Assignment III is of course underway. If you are choosing to work on it, we are continuing to provide support, especially on the course forum. Of course there is no pressure to work on it, since it is only worth bonus marks - if you are struggling to make it to the end of this term, I'd recommend ignoring it completely and just focusing on the exam instead :)

Assignment I Rerun Marks 🏅

...have been released if you applied for them :)

MyExperience ✒️

MyExperience is now open! It's really important that you fill it out: a lot of the recent changes in this course have been directly because of myExperience feedback but we are constantly looking to improve, and any nice comments can really make your tutor's term 😊

Sample Exam 🧭

A reminder the sample exam will be held next week during lab time! You will need to attend an in-person lab to complete the sample: you will be given a special login by your tutor to let you access the exam environment on CSE machines.

The full paper, plus sample solutions, will only be publicly released on WebCMS at the end of Week 10, so everyone is encouraged to attend next week. If you did not attend the sample exam and encounter technical difficulties during the actual exam that could have been resolved by you attending, we are less likely to be lenient in those circumstances.

Please also note that the sample exam's format and style of questions will be the same as the actual exam, but the difficulty does not necessarily reflect the difficulty of the actual exam.

Exam Revision 🌪️

We will be releasing a list of exam revision materials at the end of next week, including details for an exam revision session run by the admin team during Week 11.

I'm sure that you all have a busy Week 10 coming up, so keep up the good work. We're in the home stretch! 🐎

Help Session for Tomorrow

Posted by Sai Nair Thursday 11 April 2024, 04:22:04 PM.

Hey everyone,

Just a notice to let everyone know that at 12-2pm tomorrow, there will be an added help session online. The link is on the Help Sessions page, and currently has two tutors available. Please respect the time of Dane and Matthew, and don't try to ask questions after 2pm.

The other thing is that the dryrun is live as mentioned before, so please use it as soon as possible to double check you haven't accidentally moved a file and messed up the testing. The VSCode extension is too good for its own good and will fix everything if you accidentally change something which isn't meant to be changed, so using the dryrun ensures you don't make that accidental mistake.

All the best with Assignment 2!

Week 9 Wednesday Lecture 📽️

Posted by Amanda Lu Wednesday 10 April 2024, 12:52:00 PM.

Here is the link to today's lecture! Again, it is also available on Echo360 if you wish to view it there.

As an separate notice - reminder to be running the Assignment II dryrun as the deadline approaches. You can also find the exact dryrun tests here https://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~cs2511/dryrun_ass2/

Good luck to all, I'll be back with a proper announcement at the end of the week

Week 9 Monday Lecture 📽️

Posted by Amanda Lu Monday 08 April 2024, 10:46:26 AM, last modified Monday 08 April 2024, 11:11:01 AM.

Hi all, as mentioned in today's lecture, the last 3 lectures of the term (today, Wednesday and next Monday) have been prerecorded. The lecture will still be streamed live in person and online during lecture times and one of the admins will be around to answer questions related to lecture content.

The recording of today's lecture is here (hyperlinked), and will also be available on Echo360.

Apologies about the technical difficulties and any questions I missed online today, feel free to repost your questions to Edstem and I will answer them there.

See you all Wednesday :)

End of Week 8 Updates 🌧️

Posted by Amanda Lu Saturday 06 April 2024, 04:07:03 PM, last modified Saturday 06 April 2024, 04:18:33 PM.

Let's keep things brief - and jump straight into the notices.

Assignment III 💗

Assignment III is released - the spec and repos have been released as of yesterday. Your groups are the same as your Assignment II groups unless previously discussed with your tutor - if you want this to be changed please contact your tutor ASAP. You may also choose to do it as an individual if you prefer. The marking criteria is different for individual vs pair so make sure you have a read of the spec!

This assignment is worth 8 % bonus assignment marks (i.e. marks to catch up on other assignment marks only) so if you choose to not complete it you won't be losing any marks. It's due Week 10 Friday, 5pm , though no late penalty will be applied on submissions until Week 11 Tuesday, 5pm .

Sample Exam 🔥

Your Week 10 lab will be dedicated to a sample exam . This is not worth any marks, but is to help you to gain familiarity with the exam environment on the CSE machines and experience some practice questions. We strongly recommend you attend this sample exam or you may be at a disadvantage for the final exam (e.g. technical issues). If you are in an online tutorial , you should attend an in-person lab for the sample exam. Contact the tutor of that class if you have any questions about attending :)

Assignment II 🛡️

Assignment II is due Friday Week 9, 5pm . A reminder no late submissions will be taken including ELP and spec cons - if you fall into these categories please email the course account for other arrangements. Remember now is also the time to make use of Help Sessions before they get inevitably more full before the assignment due date. Our final sessions before the deadline are on next Thursday so make sure you get your questions answered before then.

Assignment I reruns 🏃

Assignment I rerun requests close at midnight tonight . Remarking will be released for those cases soon after.

Lots of notices this week but I recommend you keep your eyes focused on Assignment II for now. Hope you are all staying dry and safe out there. Good luck and see you in Week 9!

End of Week 7 Updates 🖊️

Posted by Amanda Lu Saturday 30 March 2024, 05:33:34 PM.

Hi everyone, hope you're enjoying your long weekend. This week's set of announcements is mostly assignment-related:

Assignment I Marks ✒️

Tutors have been working hard marking Assignment I, your marks should be available 10am tomorrow (Sunday ) on Sturec . Feedback will be available on Gitlab (and may already be released for many classes), either in a new branch or as an issue. Automarking results have also already been pushed to your repos in a new branch. All marks are subject to plagarism checks that we will be conducting.

Some of you submitted code that failed to run on our autotests due to a small error. If you wish to rectify this you can make a patch of less than 20 lines difference and submit this form to request a re-run. As we provided a dryrun, a rerun will incur a 20% penalty to the final automark (including if your code did not compile), though we will take your original mark if your rerun mark ends up being lower. The form will close at 11:59pm on 6/4/24, one week from now.

If you have issues with your manual marking, please email your marker (should be the person who pushed your feedback).

No matter your results we hope you have learnt and grown your skills from this assignment, and that you can apply the feedback you receive from it to Assignment II and the real world as well :)

Assignment II ✏️

Assignment II is well underway, we hope you have made a solid start on it.

On a similar topic to above, a reminder that we also have a dryrun for Task 2 of Assignment II, please run it to make sure that assignment II compiles correctly as well. It's especially important to run as you go instead of leaving it to the last minute and having unexpected bugs come up before submission. Don't panic because of errors - all groups are guaranteed to fail the dryrun for the Task 2 tasks they did not do.

Finally, thank you to everyone who is asking questions on Edstem, and please keep them coming! It's great to see so many people engaging thoughtfully with the tasks we have set.

End of Week 6 Updates 🐣

Posted by Amanda Lu Sunday 24 March 2024, 07:03:51 PM.

Hey all, hope your break has been restful and you're ready for the second half of term! Just wanted to flag a small number of things as we go into Week 7.

Assignment II 🧑💻

During Monday's lecture we will have an overview of Assignment II - please attend and bring your questions about the assignment :)

Again a reminder that if you have any concerns about contribution or groupwork, you must flag it with your tutor as soon as it occurs . This allows the tutor to help you resolve the conflict sooner rather than later, and to keep track of the "paper trail" of events that have occured - so it's in your benefit!

Finally, the approved assumption link has been amended and the list of approved assumptions is now up on the forum.

Easter Holidays 🐰

This coming weekend is the Easter long weekend. We have a number of classes on Monday Week 8 that cannot run due to the public holiday - if you are in one of those classes, you may need to attend a different class that week, or your tutor may choose to run a makeup class. Your tutor should inform you of what you should do on the coming Monday but please contact them if you are unsure.

End of Week 5 Updates 💤

Posted by Amanda Lu Sunday 17 March 2024, 09:34:18 AM.

Hey everyone, well done on making it to the end of Week 5! We hope you use flexi week as a chance to recharge, get outside, and do something non-uni related for a change 😴

This week's updates:

Assignment 1 🚄

Well done to most of you for completing Assignment 1! No matter how you found it, we hope you at least found it helpful, and learnt something along the way.

For those of you still working on the assignment, please note no submissions will be taken after next Friday 5pm - anything submitted after this point will be awarded 0 marks. This includes ELS and spec cons cases as well.

Our tutors will be hard at work marking over the next few weeks 💪💪 We're aiming to get the marks and feedback back to you by the end of Week 7.

Assignment 2 🎮

Assignment 2 has been out for a few days now - make sure to have a read of the spec. We recommend you attempt a start to it over Week 6: as you possibly learnt from Assignment 1, good design takes time! It's good to have at least a think about the tasks you need to do sooner rather than later.

If you have any teamwork issues with your partner, it's important to communicate with your partner and your tutor ASAP to try and resolve it, ideally the week the issues occur. If you leave it to Week 11 there's not much we can do 😔

Labs 📈

Lab05 is due Week 7 Monday , but working through it might help with your understanding of the assignment, so it might be good to take an earlier look at it as well.

Extra Help 🫧

Help sessions are still running over the break! As always, the schedule is on WebCMS.

That's it for now, lectures and tutorials resume Monday Week 7!

End of Week 4 Updates 👾

Posted by Amanda Lu Saturday 09 March 2024, 08:02:57 PM, last modified Saturday 09 March 2024, 08:03:39 PM.

Hey all, hope you are having a good week! Here are the updates for Week 4.

Labs 🧪

Lab 04 is due Week 5 , Monday 10am.
Lab 05 is due Week 7 , Monday 10am.

Assignment I 🌠

Assignment I is due next Friday (Week 5) at 5pm - less than a week to go! Remember to submit via pushing to your main branch on Gitlab. We'll only take your latest submission, so feel free to push as many times as you want.

As is common in many courses, Gitlab pipelines tend to slow down or fail when many people are pushing at the same time (near the deadlines). Our recommendations are to submit early and test locally before you submit.

Our last few help sessions before the assignment deadline are running Monday to Thursday next week, feel free to drop in if you need any help!

Finally, remember to be running the dryrun command to make sure your code compiles. More info in the spec and last week's announcement.

Assignment II ♟️

The Assignment II specification will be released on Tuesday night, on the Assignments tab on WebCMS. Tutors are in the process of finalising groups - if by Wednesday you still don't know who your partner is please contact your tutor.

Repos will be created for your groups on Friday evening - but no need to stress about jumping straight onto it! We recommend finishing Assignment I first. We're releasing Assignment II earlier rather than later so that you'll have Week 6 to read the spec and have a think about it. We'll be going through the assignment in more depth in our Week 7 Monday lecture.

Week 5 Lectures 🎶

We're now in the second phase of the course - Design Patterns! Think of these as tools in your toolkit, both for Assignment II and after in your software career.

End of Week 3 Updates 🍂

Posted by Amanda Lu Saturday 02 March 2024, 09:55:13 PM.

Hi everyone, we're wrapping up week 3 with just a few updates.

Assignment I 🌠

Assignment I has been out for a couple weeks. If you haven't looked at it yet, you should try to get started on it soon! It's due 5pm on Friday Week 5 .

In particular, we have provided you with a dryrun command that you can run on CSE machines to make sure your code compiles with our autotests. We encourage you to run the dryrun often (e.g. each time you finish part 1a, 1b, etc) - takes less than a minute and will help you avoid any last-minute problems close to submission.

Of course, we have plenty of tutors staffed on help sessions and on the course forum if you need extra help :)

Coursework Marks ✅

Lab marks are starting to be released, and you can access them via give . The lab marks are updated daily so if they are showing as `.` then it means you don't have a mark in the system for that lab yet. If you have any questions about your lab marks, please email your tutor and lab assistant.

Assignment II Pairs 👯

Looking Ahead ☀️

We’ve covered the foundational elements of the course – OO Concepts, some fundamental programming patterns and Design Principles. We're now moving into the wide and wonderful world of Design Patterns starting next week.

Enjoy your weekend, and see you in week 4!

End of Week 2 Updates 🐨

Posted by Amanda Lu Thursday 22 February 2024, 08:08:02 PM.

Hi everyone, just a few short updates this week!

Assignment 1 🛰️

Assignment 1 has been released - it's great to see so many of you getting stuck into it! If you haven't already, we recommend getting started on it over the next few days (or at least sooner rather than later), since a lot of the thinking and figuring out how the pieces fit together takes time.

Next week we’ll be covering some more concepts that will be useful for the assignment - we'll be going over some core Design Principles as well as JUnit testing in the lectures, and UML diagrams in the tutorials .

Assignment II Pairs ⚔️

Next week in the labs your tutors will give you the chance to start forming pairs for Assignment II. Your partner must be from the same lab as you. We always try to take your preferences into account and your tutors will do their best to make things work, but we can't guarantee everyone will get their preferences :)

Lab Due Date Typo 👾

Hope the end of the week is going smoothly and see you next week! 🐨

CSE Systems down - Friday night & Saturday

Posted by Amanda Lu Monday 19 February 2024, 06:18:46 PM, last modified Monday 19 February 2024, 06:19:31 PM.

Hi all,

We have been informed that CSE systems have some planned downtime over this coming weekend. This means that services such as WebCMS, VLab, and Gitlab pipeline runners will be down. The dates and times of the downtime will be:

Start : Friday 23rd February 2024 8 PM

End : Saturday 24th February 2024 10 PM

Note that you can still work locally on your local machines, including running Gradle and testing, as well as push your submissions to Gitlab (though your pipeline will most likely fail due to runners being down). You can retry your pipelines once the downtime is over.

As a result of this, we will also be extending the due date of Lab02 by 24 hours to Tuesday 27th 10am. Your repos will be updated shortly to reflect this.

Enjoy your weekend - hope you are staying dry! 🌧️

End of Week 1 Updates 🦸

Posted by Amanda Lu Saturday 17 February 2024, 05:59:21 PM.

Hey all, we've made it to the end of Week 1! Hope you've had a chance to meet some of the course staff and your peers and have started to get settled into the course. Every week we'll be posting announcements on WebCMS to keep you updated on what's coming up and help you keep track of important course information. Here's the announcements for Week 1:

Tutorial Solutions + Recordings 🎥

Lab 01 📝

We encourage you to attempt all your labs as you can since it's some of the foundational learning for this course - if you're struggling with setup or with completing your labs, please go to a help session or post on the forum.

Assignment I 🛰️

Getting Help ❓

That's it! Enjoy the rest of your weekend.

Up next we're jumping straight into Week 2 content and Assignment I - it might seem soon, but don't worry - we'll be building up your knowledge and skills week by week to get you equipped for the assignment :) 🦸

Welcome to COMP2511 (24T1)

Posted by Ashesh Mahidadia Friday 09 February 2024, 09:50:50 AM.

Welcome to The Art of Software Design (Object-Oriented Design and Programming)! The course outline is now available; please take the time to carefully read it as it contains all the necessary details for the most recent course offering. The website for the course is located at https://webcms3.cse.unsw.edu.au/COMP2511/24T1/ .

If you have any queries about the course, please use the course forum . The course forum can be accessed by following the instructions provided here .

The tutorial and lab start in Week 01. You can find Tutorials and Labs by clicking on the corresponding links in the left panel of the course website .

The first lecture starts at 9:00 am on Monday , February 12th! The location and link are listed under COMP2511 Lectures (in Person/Online) .

Twenty-three enthusiastic tutors, the administrative staff (Alvin, Sai, Carl, and Amanda), and I look forward to starting the new term next week.

Cheers
Dr Ashesh Mahidadia
LIC, COMP2511 (24T1)