We have received several questions about documentation for PS6, so we would like to clarify our expectations. The Documentating a Software System handout gives ranges for page lengths that are not necessarily accurate. With respect to "Problem Analysis" we expect far less than what is stated since we have not emphasized problem modeling in this course. You can complete that section in under one page.

With respect to the design section, however, we will expect to see an analysis of the module dependencies and runtime structure of your system. The page length guides here are reasonable.

Finally, when documenting your testing strategy, you should feel free to include discussions from previous psets to complete your analysis.

If it helps, consider your audience to be previous 6.170 students who might not have completed the MapQuick assignment.

Quiz 2 Review will be on Sunday, 10/26/2003 from 7-9 pm at 4-163. All students are strongly encouraged to attend.

The final problem set has been posted. Note that there are two due dates for this problem set. There is a checkpoint due date on Thursday 10/23/2003 (11.59 pm) and a final due date on Thursday, 10/30/2003 (12.00 pm - noon). Please read PS6 handout for more details.

PS5 has been posted. PS5 is due on 10/14/2003 at 12.00 pm sharp.

The deadline for PS4 has been extended to Thursday, 10/9/2003 at 12.00pm. Please be aware that PS5 will still be released on Tuesday, 10/7/2003 and it will still be due on the following Tuesday, 10/14/2003 at 12.00 pm. LAs will be on hand this Tuesday and Wednesday and TAs will still hold their regular office hours. In addition, please check the "Errata" and "Q&A" sections in the PS4 handout for updates and clarifications.

The staff will not give out staff test cases and will not re-run staff test to validate changes that students have made. Instead, students should attempt to create new test cases to reproduce errors found by staff tests and then fix their code to pass the new tests, contacting the TAs and LAs if they have any problems.

Quiz Review will be Sunday 7-9pm in 34-101. The TAs will not be preparing material to last the entire session; you are encouraged to bring your own questions/topics to discuss.

In-class quiz on Tuesday, 9/30/2003 at Walker Memorial from 2-3 PM.
This is a closed book quiz and will be 50 minutes long. Materials that will be covered include Lecture 1 to 10, specified readings in the course calendar, materials covered in recitations, and Problem Sets 1-3.

Problem Set 4 is live. This problem set will be due October 7, 2003 at 12 noon.

An electronic help queue has been set up for students seeking help from the LAs to ensure fair service wait times to all students.

HOW TO USE THE ONLINE WAITLIST

Registration:
You have to first register to the waitlist system in order to enter the queue. This registration has be to done ONLY ONCE. You must register with your Athena username. If you still get tourist errors, you might not be in the student list. Email the staff about it!!!

Waitlist:
In order to add/remove yourself to the Waitlist, you first have to register to the system. You can use the "Register" link for doing so. Once registered, all subsequent tries to register will be avoided. Thus, the only way to change your password is to email the staff. If you have not registered, or if you entered your password or username wrong, you WILL NOT see an error message. Your request to be added to the waitlist will be simply ignored. Your username and password is kept alive when reloading the Waitlist, so you dont have to type them each time you make an add/remove request.

Locate Staff:
Locate Staff page has the online staff names, weekly hours, and a map of W20.

We have removed the method getGeoSegments from the class ps3.Route. You will no longer be required to implement it. However, you must still implement the method getGeoSegments in the class ps3.RoutePart. There is not need to re-download the code for Problem Set 3 if you have already downloaded it. Our tests will just ignore Route.getGeoSegments.

All 6.170 students are asked to fill out a survey at http://www.mit.edu/~6.170/info/continuous-testing-feedback.html
This survey will complete the data collection for the continuous testing study, but all students are asked to submit the information before this FRIDAY, to be eligible for a prize. Your answers will help us to evaluate and improve continuous testing. It should take about 5 minutes to complete. All answers will be kept strictly confidential. All students who answer before Friday, September 19, will be entered into a drawing for $50.

All students who wish to use continuous testing from PS3 on are invited to do so. Anyone participating in the study will now have all tools enabled. If you wish to turn off the tools, please type turn-off-continuous-testing at the athena prompt. Anyone who did not participate in the study, but who wants to use the tools, will need to run student-setup.pl again, and say yes to the study (no data will be collected from you--this will only enable the continuous testing tools). Note that in order for continuous testing to work on PS3 (and any later problem set), the following must be true:

• You must run get-ps-files ps3 to get the ps3 files, then log out and log back in.
• You must write your own ps3/AllTests.java test suite--this will be the test suite that is run by the continuous testing tools. For an example of putting several test suites together into one, see AllTest.java. Until this class compiles and runs, no useful test output will be provided. The TA's did this step in the past, but now, it's up to you.

Problem Set 3 has been posted on the Web. Note that from Problem Set 3 onwards, the next problem set will be incrementally build on the previous problem set.

Problem Set 2 Errata
The provided implementation for RatPolyStack.checkRep is incorrect. The correct implementation has been posted on the Web.

Students who are participating in the continuous testing study will be randomly assigned to new groups when they start work on PS2. This means that some students that had fully-functional continuous testing will have it disabled, and some who had it disabled will now have it enabled, and some will stay the same. The study will end with the beginning of PS3, at which point all students that want continuous testing enabled can have it so. If you have any questions about this, please contact saff at MIT.

Section assignments has been posted.

Problem Set 2 has been posted.

Problem 4 incorrectly indicated that only evaluateHand and compareSameRankingHands needed to be implemented for Straight and TwoPair. The constructor and accessors for each class also need to be implemented to pass the tests and complete the assignment.