SENG2011 Notices

Final marks and Assignment 2 feedback

Posted by Albert Nymeyer Thursday 16 December 2021, 09:48:13 AM.

The second assignment feedback has been released to coincide with the release today by UNSW of final course marks. There are quite a few requests for Special Consideration for the final examination that are being processed by Student Services. These have been given a temporary grade of WC. I will say more about how the final examination went later.

Exam Closed

Posted by Felicia Ee Wednesday 08 December 2021, 11:59:53 AM.

Congratulations on finishing! The exam is over.

You should have submitted all questions by now (ELP students may continue working until their specified deadline).

Please do not share, upload, or discuss the questions or your solutions as students are still completing the exam. This would still constitute a violation of the exam conditions.

Almost Finished

Posted by Felicia Ee Wednesday 08 December 2021, 11:29:07 AM, last modified Wednesday 08 December 2021, 11:29:18 AM.

The exam finishes at 12pm, in 30 minutes (ELP students finish later)

Please make sure you have submitted what you have so far. Don't leave it to the last moment to submit. Submissions received after 12pm will be ignored.

Halfway Mark

Posted by Felicia Ee Wednesday 08 December 2021, 10:30:44 AM.

You are now about halfway through the exam. Please make sure you have submitted what you have so far, and continue to submit each question as you go along.

Ex4 and Ex5 clarification

Posted by Felicia Ee Wednesday 08 December 2021, 10:04:15 AM.

In Ex4 part 2 and Ex5, every reference to a 'pair' means two consecutive, identical characters, just as in Ex4 part 1.

Don't forget to submit regularly! Even if you are only halfway through an exercise there is no harm in submitting.

Exam Opening Soon

Posted by Felicia Ee Wednesday 08 December 2021, 08:29:59 AM, last modified Wednesday 08 December 2021, 08:53:16 AM.

Hello everybody,

• The Exam will be released at 8:45am on the Exam page. The first 15 minutes are reading/planning time, followed by 3 hours to complete the exam. The exam paper and helper code will also be available: >>> here <<<
• You have until 12pm to submit your solutions to the exercises, ELP students get more time.
• If you wish to contact us, make a post on Piazza. We will set the forum to private soon.
• Make sure WebCMS3 announcements are visible to you as we will make any important announcements here.
• Any attempt to cheat, plagiarise, share solutions, receive unauthorised assistance, or anything else that may be considered misconduct, will be treated seriously.
• Communicating with others during the exam, via Facebook/Discord/in person/any other means, is considered misconduct.

We wish you all the best. Smash it, SENG2011!

Final Exam Tomorrow

Posted by Felicia Ee Tuesday 07 December 2021, 02:11:01 PM, last modified Tuesday 07 December 2021, 03:38:43 PM.

The final exam will be released on WebCMS3 tomorrow at 8:45am (AEDT), under 'Exam'. There will also be an alternate backup link posted.

Make sure you:

• Read the Final Examination rules again
• Decide (if you haven't already) how you will do the exam, keeping in mind that:
  • your code must verify on the CSE Dafny
  • you should submit each exercise as you complete it (do not wait until the end of the 3 hours)
  • you can submit even if an exercise is partially working to ‘lock it in'
• Open/download materials you would like access to from the Course Website BEFORE the exam (tonight). Do not rely on WebCMS3 being fast, everyone will be accessing it simultaneously
• Get a good night's sleep
• Manage your time well during the exam - if you're stuck on one question, move on to the others and come back to it

Regarding communications:

• The Piazza forum will be on private mode. You can use it to communicate with us during the exam
• Normal exam rules apply, we cannot help you on the forum to do the exercise
• Note that some students have extra time so the forum will not open until this time is up
• You must be able to receive an email during the exam at your Uni email account. Any important announcements will be made on WebCMS3 and via email

See you in the morning (or whatever time of day it is where you are). Good luck!

Assignment 2 Solutions

Posted by Felicia Ee Friday 03 December 2021, 01:39:04 PM.

Hi everyone,

Hope your exams are going well. Assignment 2 solutions have just been released on the course website under Assignments. Feel free to discuss the questions and solutions in the forum.

The solutions to Sample Exam 4 are also up under Practice and Play.

Another Sample Mini-Exam

Posted by Felicia Ee Tuesday 30 November 2021, 03:58:32 PM.

A fourth one-hour sample exam has been released. Solutions to follow soon.

Final Exam Details

Posted by Felicia Ee Monday 29 November 2021, 10:53:50 AM.

Hi all,

Details on the final exam are now available under 'Exam'. Please carefully read through the Final Examination Rules before the exam. There is also a document titled 'UNSW Online Exam Preparation Check List' with some additional rules/advice (this is a general document).

It is a 3 hour exam with 15 minutes reading time. All the questions will be Dafny programming exercises. Week 1 content is not directly examinable, so no questions on 'theory'. The best way to prepare is more Dafny practice - the sample exams, practice exercises in Practice and Play, and the questions from Flex Week.

Sample exam solutions are available under Practice and Play. More sample questions to come.

Thank you to everyone who filled out myExperience! The course reached over 60% completion so the Bonus Upgrade Mark will be given to anyone who gets 64, 74, or 84.

Good luck for all your exams!

3rd sample mini-exam and bonus upgrade

Posted by Albert Nymeyer Wednesday 24 November 2021, 11:57:46 AM.

• A 3rd sample mini-exam has been placed in Practice and Play. Solutions will be released sometime soon. Test yourself.

• Final reminder about the myExperience survey. Still nowhere near 60% response. Last year a dozen students had a mark at the top of a PS, CR, DN grade and profited from a Bonus Upgrade Mark. It could be you!

Assignment 2 over + Sample Exams + myExperience bonus mark

Posted by Felicia Ee Tuesday 23 November 2021, 11:25:02 AM.

Assignment 2

Assignment 2 is now behind us, well done! Please note that some students have extensions, so we ask that you keep any discussion on Assignment 2 private on the forum.

The solutions to Assignment 2 will be released once everyone has submitted, which should be around 30th November. Marking should take about 10-12 days, starting now, so marks will be released just a few days before the exam. Apologies we can't give more time between the marks and the exam.

Final Exam

More information about the exam including difficulty, topics, and marking will be coming soon. There are two 1-hour sample exams available for you to try. You can submit your solutions just as in the final exam (although they will not be marked). The solutions will be released later this week, in the mean time we encourage you to discuss the questions in the forum. We are trialling this shorter format in practice exams as bad time allocation is a major problem in exams. More sample exams will follow this week.

myExperience

myExperience is closing this Thursday , and we would very much appreciate it if you could complete the survey for this course. You may remember that Quiz 6 Question 9's 'BUM Policy' refers to a bonus mark for anyone who achieves 64, 74, or 84, to upgrade them to the next grade. This will be implemented if the myExperience response rate reaches 60% . Right now it is currently 17%, so don't forget to fill it out and encourage other students to do so as well!

Assignment 2 Submission

Posted by Felicia Ee Monday 22 November 2021, 11:25:12 AM.

Some reminders about Assignment 2 submission:

• Make sure you’ve tested it on CSE
• Check your filenames and method names
• If you haven’t attempted an exercise, submit an empty file with the right filename
• Make sure your specifications are readable/formatted properly
• Even if you cannot get a specification working, bare-bones working code is worth some marks. Submit your code and include a tester with a Main() and print statements.
• Do not use assume or function methods
• If verification takes a long time, include a comment about it at the start of the file

What you need to submit for each question:

1. LemCNN and a tester
2. SecondLargest and a tester
3. ooo, Getooo, and one or two testers (you can have one ooo tester and one Getooo tester, or you can combine them)
4. Repair. Do not include Tester or the rest of the Quack class
5. Prison

Using other functions, predicates, and lemmas is allowed. Do not include any methods other than those listed.

Assignment 2 Deadline Extended

Posted by Felicia Ee Sunday 21 November 2021, 11:14:03 AM.

The deadline for Assignment 2 has been postponed 24 hours, to 9pm Monday 22nd. Anyone with an extension also has their deadline postponed 24 hours.

We've had a lot of questions and discussions in the forum about the assignment, keep it up!

Assignment 2 Deadline

Posted by Felicia Ee Friday 19 November 2021, 02:57:50 PM.

Hi all,

A reminder that Assignment 2 is due on Sunday 21st at 9pm . Make sure any forum posts with code snippets or very specific implementation questions are set to private.

It seems there has been some confusion over late penalties. Late penalties are applied to your actual mark, not the ceiling mark. So if you achieve 30 out of 40 but submit 1 day late, your mark will become 0.85*30 = 25.5 out of 40.

Regarding verification time limits: don't spend too much time on getting your exercises under 30 seconds. If your program verifies successfully but takes a long time, add a comment at the top of the file saying how long it takes. Prioritise getting other questions verifying before trying to optimise.

Good luck!

Week 10 Notices

Posted by Felicia Ee Monday 15 November 2021, 10:29:13 AM, last modified Wednesday 17 November 2021, 07:15:22 PM.

Hi everyone,

• The final lecture is now available.
• Assignment 1 marks have been updated..
• Assignment 2 is due this Sunday 21st November at 9pm . Some notes on this:
  • All exercises require just one method in the submission, except for tester methods. This restriction is for your benefit: to discourage you from over-programming a solution.
  • In the prison exercise, prisoners may be called on arbitrary days for interrogation, and an arbitrary number of times. No prisoner knows who has preceded them, or even how many. They do know how many times they themselves have been called. This lack of knowledge of the outside world is essential to the riddle (and why the light bulb is so important).
• Two sample mini-exams have been released under Practice and Play. Please note that these are only 1 hour long, while the final exam is 3 hours long. Solutions will be released at the start of Week 11.
• Don't forget to complete your MyExperience surveys. Your feedback is highly valued, especially because this course's structure has changed a lot in the past few years, and can help make strong courses in the future. Check your student email for the link!

Enjoy your week!

Assignment 1 Results

Posted by Felicia Ee Monday 08 November 2021, 12:04:12 PM.

The marks for Assignment 1 have just been released. Late penalties have not yet been applied. If your submission was late, your results will include a note of how many days late.

The grade profile is:

• mark <= 9: 7 students
• 10<= mark <=19: 20 students
• 20<= mark <=29: 40 students
• 30<= mark <=34: 43 students
• 35<= mark <=39: 52 students
• 40: 10 students

Solutions for the assignment are now available under Assignments. This week's lectures are also available - the final lecture is important for the QuackRepair exercise in Assignment 2.

Quiz 5 and New Video

Posted by Felicia Ee Wednesday 03 November 2021, 09:42:52 AM.

Quiz 5 has just opened, due on Sunday as usual. Albert has also made a new Practice and Play video on MaxArray, finding the largest element in an array. This should be helpful for ex2 of Assignment 2.

Week 8 Lectures

Posted by Felicia Ee Monday 01 November 2021, 09:22:10 AM.

The Week 8 lectures have been released. The second lecture on 100 Prisoners is especially relevant to Assignment 2.

Assignment 2

Posted by Felicia Ee Tuesday 26 October 2021, 08:05:29 AM.

Assignment 2 has been released. It is due Sunday 21st November 9pm , with submission through the course website. Make sure you read the requirements and conditions of each question carefully.

Quiz 4 will be open from tomorrow morning as usual.

Week 7 Notices

Posted by Felicia Ee Monday 25 October 2021, 09:05:29 AM.

Hi all,

This week's lectures are now available on the course website, covering proofs and lemmas.

Quiz 4 will be opening on Wednesday.

Enjoy your week!

Flex Week

Posted by Felicia Ee Tuesday 19 October 2021, 11:08:49 AM.

Hi all,

Hope you are enjoying a bit of a break this week! Flex week is a good time to catch up on content and get some more practice with Dafny. Here are some exercises to try (completely optional):

• Given two arrays of integers, it returns a single array with all integers appended. [1,5,2,3], [4,3,5] -> [1,5,2,3,4,3,5]
• Given an array of characters, it returns the index of the first ‘e’. [‘c’,’h’,’e’,’e’,’s’,’e’] -> 2
• Given an array of characters, it filters all the vowels. [‘d’,’e’,’l’,’i’,’g’,’h’,’t’] -> [’e’,’i’]
• Count negatives - video solution will be released on Friday
• Zap negatives - video solution will be released on Friday

Feel free to discuss and post your solutions on the forum. Have a great week!

Assignment 1 due tonight

Posted by Felicia Ee Sunday 17 October 2021, 02:35:22 PM.

Hi everyone!

Hope everything is going well with the assignment. A reminder that the deadline is 9pm tonight . You can make multiple submissions so submit early to make sure there are no issues.

Forum will be set to Private

Posted by Felicia Ee Wednesday 13 October 2021, 07:41:49 PM.

Hi everyone,

With the assignment due soon, there have been a lot of questions about it in the forum. From 9pm tonight we will be setting the forum to private posts only. It will be back to normal after the due date.

Also, it was pointed out that the answer for Q1 of Quiz 3 was not consistent with Dafny behaviour, which must have changed since the question was written. We'll change the marks so anyone who selected b and/or c (and nothing else) will get full marks for that question.

Week 5 Notices

Posted by Felicia Ee Monday 11 October 2021, 10:07:45 AM.

Hi team,

• This week's lectures are now available
• Assignment 1 is due Sunday 9pm
• No quiz this week!

Week 4 Notices

Posted by Felicia Ee Wednesday 06 October 2021, 11:11:18 AM.

Hi all!

• Quiz 3 is now open, due this Sunday at 9pm as usual
• Quiz 2 marks are also out under Grades or through the quiz page for more details
• Assignment 1 is due next Sunday 17th October at 9pm
• A reminder that the census date is coming up on Sunday 10th October, which is the last date you can drop a course without financial/academic penalty

Quiz 2 Closes Today

Posted by Felicia Ee Sunday 03 October 2021, 01:54:54 PM.

Hope you are all enjoying the long weekend! A reminder that Quiz 2 is due tonight at 9pm. Make sure you have changed your clocks for Daylight Savings! Remember that you can submit multiple times, so submit early.

Quiz 1 Marks and Week 4 Lectures

Posted by Felicia Ee Friday 01 October 2021, 10:47:52 PM.

A few updates:

• Quiz 1 marks and feedback are now available on the course website
• Week 4 lectures have been released, going through predicates, recursion, sets, and sequences
• Albert has also made a video where he writes a program to reverse an array - you can see it under Practice and Play. For anyone unsure how to start on Q6 of the assignment, this will help with demonstrating the process of writing a Dafny program

Enjoy!

Quiz 2

Posted by Felicia Ee Wednesday 29 September 2021, 09:03:54 AM.

Hi all!

Quiz 2 is now open, closing this Sunday at 9pm. Remember that you can make as many submissions as you like, so submit early!

Quiz 1 and Week 3 Lectures

Posted by Felicia Ee Saturday 25 September 2021, 05:32:32 PM.

A reminder that Quiz 1 is due tomorrow at 9pm . You can resubmit as many times as you want before the deadline, but you will not be able to change your answers after this.

The lectures and slides for next week have been released. We've also added a Dafny Readme under Practice and Play that explains how to use CSE Dafny and the VSCode extension, as a supplement to the Getting Started video.

Enjoy the rest of your weekend!

Assignment 1 Release

Posted by Felicia Ee Wednesday 22 September 2021, 04:12:23 PM.

Assignment 1 has been released! You can find it under Assignments on the course website. It covers predicate logic, Hoare logic, and verification in Dafny.

The assignment is due 9PM Week 5 Sunday 17th October . Submission is through the course website.

If you have any questions about the assignment don't hesitate to ask on the Piazza forum!

Week 2 Notices

Posted by Felicia Ee Monday 20 September 2021, 04:21:44 PM.

Hope you have enjoyed the first week back!

The Week 2 lectures and slides have been released. They will introduce you to Dafny. I've also made a 'Getting Started' video to explain how to use CSE Dafny to verify your programs. You can see it under Practice and Play on the course website or on Moodle.

We have decided to open the first quiz early since it covers last week's content as well. It's available now under Activities, and will close this Sunday at 9pm . You can make multiple attempts, but only your latest submission will be marked. Future quizzes will open on Wednesdays at 9am. Note: please avoid directly discussing the quiz questions in the forum. Asking more general questions to clarify concepts is ok, just don't discuss specific quiz questions (or very similar questions).

In lectures Albert occasionally refers to Dafny that runs on the Microsoft website rise4fun.com. This website has been down for weeks (after a decade of operation). This is a pity as it provides an interesting user interface, but isn't a problem for the course as we use Dafny on the CSE network, which is the latest version, 3.2, recently installed. We will change the references to rise4fun once the future of the website is made known.

Practice exercises and other bits

Posted by Felicia Ee Thursday 16 September 2021, 01:36:21 PM.

Hi all,

Hope the term has started off well! A couple of practice exercises have been added under 'Practice and Play' in the sidebar. We'll be adding some more throughout the term. Some of the exercises may be ahead of lecture content so don't stress if you can't answer them all just yet! Quizzes will also give you a chance to practise the latest content once they start next week.

We've made some slight changes to the course website structure, including a day/time column in the course schedule.

Some news from CSESoc: they're running a Study Pals Program to help you make some new friends to study with this term. Signups close this Sunday - see all the details here .

First Lectures

Posted by Felicia Ee Monday 13 September 2021, 10:05:19 AM.

Hi everyone,

The Week 1 lectures have been released on Moodle, along with a welcome from the LiC Albert. Lecture slides are available on WebCMS3 . They cover propositional logic and Hoare logic. Mastering these topics early will help a lot throughout the course and especially with the first assignment. Lectures will continue to be released on Monday mornings.

Note that since the lectures are prerecorded, you can disregard the Wednesday lecture timeslot as it will not be used.

Quiz 1 will be released next week, covering both Week 1 and 2 content.

Have a great week!

Welcome!

Posted by Felicia Ee Friday 10 September 2021, 01:23:02 PM, last modified Saturday 11 September 2021, 12:13:13 PM.

Hello and welcome to SENG2011! I'm Felicia, the course admin this term. In this course you'll be learning about the importance of software verification and how to use Dafny to verify the behaviour of programs. If it's been a while since MATH1081 I'd recommend giving yourself a refresher on discrete maths, as well as COMP2111 if you have done it.

Course Resources
The course outline, lectures, assignments, and other resources can be found on the course website . Any important announcements will also be posted here.

Lectures
Lectures are pre-recorded and released on Moodle, lecture notes on WebCMS3. The first lectures will be up soon.

Forum
You should have received an email invitation to the forum; if not, you can also use the link in the sidebar.

The Piazza forum should be your first point of contact for questions about the course. I encourage everyone to be active in both asking questions and answering them - explaining a concept is the best way to cement your knowledge!

Assessment
The assessment breakdown is as follows:

• Weekly quizzes (10%)
• Assignment 1 (15%)
• Assignment 2 (25%)
• Final Exam (50%)
  • This is a double pass course - if your final exam mark is below the pass mark, your mark for the exam will be set to 0.

Quizzes and assignments will be released via the course website. Details on the final exam will be available closer to the exam period. More info can be found in the course outline .

Course Contact
The forum is the best place to get a timely, content-related question answered!

Contact me at felicia.ee@student.unsw.edu.au if you have a question specific to yourself not appropriate for the public forum. If you need to talk to the lecturer directly, you can email Albert at a.nymeyer@unsw.edu.au

Schedule
The intended scheduling of the course can be found here .

All the best for the term!

Felicia

Welcome to SENG2011

Posted by Albert Nymeyer Monday 06 September 2021, 10:52:37 AM.

Hello, and welcome to the course. The course is about the practice of software verification. Software is everywhere, but can you trust the programmers that wrote it? Verification is what you do to guarantee that a program does what is intended. This topic should be compulsory for every software developer: its about taking responsibility and being accountable for what you write.

I have tried to make the material in the course engaging, even fun, but behind the scenes there is some very serious and complex discrete mathematics, which you should develop an appreciation for. A course outline and a tentative course schedule can be found on the left of the home page. The course forum will be set up shortly.

Albert