Grading

A successful product or project is the culmination of many small parts that work together. No one part can take all the credit for a success, they must all be present and executed correctly. While different projects emphasize and identify different criterion, we will focus on the following: design, project management, grammar, implementation, completeness, correctness, and performance.

Design

Your design write-up should describe the top-level architecture, which usually comprises the major components within your product, their responsibilities, and the general flow of information between them. The design document should also identify and describe key data structures/algorithms and why you chose them.

Remember that functional correctness is only a small part of the design. A good design (and implementation) addresses the important aspects of a product: scalability, flexibility, and maintainability.

LOLCODE There are likely only two components: the parser and the interpreter, but there are a number of key design decisions, for example the token/grammar structure and the design of the AST nodes. The interpreter must be an external walker, and must handle symbols and control flow.

VCalc The information flow in this project is much more interesting. You need to design an AST and Symbol table, and use them to implement multiple passes including: symbol definitions, symbol resolutions and semantic checking, type checking, and code generation.

Gazprea While the top-level architecture is almost identical to VCalc, the rich type system within can increase complexity substantially unless it is managed. It is also important to understand and select dialects that make sense for your design.

Software Engineering Processes

Project management practices come into play on large projects where multiple developers or teams are working simultaneously on different parts of the project. The design must be decomposed into tasks and each task must be sized and assigned such that each team member has an equal amount of (estimated) work. It can help to break large tasks into smaller sub-tasks, because sizing can be more accurate, but dependencies between sub-tasks must be identified so that a critical path can be identified.

The tasks should be recorded and tracked in Github Project. The development coding processes, such as commit conventions and reviews, should also be agreed upon, and then enforced in the CI pipeline. The CI processes should also include building a test suite that can be used for regression testing. A typical process is that each feature PR includes tests that demonstrate it’s correctness.

It is important to actually track the tasks that you identified. Often you will have to refine/resize them or discover new tasks that must be sized and assigned. Only by tracking these tasks can you know that your team can deliver your product on time.

Grammar

Your grammar should correctly implement the specification.
Your grammar should have a consistent style.
Your grammar should be clean and readable.

Implementation Guidelines Compliance

Your implementation should comply with the guidelines provided in the assignment’s specification.

In general, your implementation should demonstrate object-oriented design principles: information hiding, abstraction, encapsulation and hierarchical specialization. Your file structure and layout should be intuitive and consistent. Note that good file structure (and communication!) can dramatically reduce merge-conflicts and all the time they waste.

You should be using Test Driven Development principles although for compilers the tests are typically at the feature level vs the unit level. You should also be testing or verifying that your porgram does not leak or stomp memory. Remember that most products are only as good as their tests!

Code Style and Consistency

You should have a consistent style throughout your assignment. For example: commenting, variable names, function names, class names, file names, indentation, etc… should be consistent in your program. You can use tools like clang-format and clang-tidy to support a consistent style. When working in teams for VCalc and Gazprea, you should discuss style early.
You are expected to separate class definitions from implementations using header (.h) and source (.cpp) files.
Your code should be clean and readable.
There is no minimum expectation for commenting or documentation.

TA Specification Tests

For each assignment, your submission will be tested on a private test-suite that tests the features defined in the assignment specification.

Competitive Testing

Competitive testing rules are outlined here: Testing.

Performance Testing

Compiler performance can be measured in two dimensions:

The time it takes to compiler to produce an executable. This measurement can help identity products with good internal design and data structures.
The speed of the executable your compiler produces. While your compiler will not do direct optimizations itself, it can still produce intermediate code that is amenable to optimization.

Grading Matrix

The following table shows the weight distribution for each grading category across different assignments in CMPUT 415.

Grading Category	Generator	LOLCODE	VCalc	Gazprea P1	Gazprea P2
Design	5%	15%	15%	15%	10%
Software Engineering	0%	0%	5%	5%	5%
Grammar	25%	15%	5%	5%	5%
Implementation	0%	15%	10%	10%	10%
TA Specification Tests	50%	35%	35%	50%	40%
Competitive Testing	20%	20%	20%	0%	20%
Coherence Testing	0%	0%	5%	5%	0%
Performance Testing	0%	0%	5%	10%	10%

After each submission of a team assignment you must fill out a team assessment. Reach out to the TA if your team encounters problems with collaboration that you are unable to resolve on your own. Your final individual grade may be lower than your team grade by a factor proportional to your contribution to the assignment.

Late Policy

At the moment of the deadline repositories are automatically pulled from Github Classroom. In the case of a late submission, the following policy is employed.

Late submissions within the first 24 hour interval after the deadline are excluded from the competitive testing tournament.
If competitive testing is not being organized for this assignment for any reason, a commensurate deduction will be applied.
Each 24 hour interval thereafter a 10% deduction is incurred.
Marks for submissions late beyond three days are capped at the minimum passing grade.

Note