Project 4 Design

Due Date

11:59pm, Saturday, April 22, 2006
No late designs accepted
NOTE: The design is due on Saturday so that the TAs can return comments to you more quickly.

Objective

The objective of this assignment is to make sure that you begin thinking about your project in a serious way early. This will not only give you experience doing design work, but will help you anticipate the number of hours that you'll need to set aside to be able to complete the project.

A new component to the design is a preliminary component of the final project, to get you writing code the first week and not waiting until the second week. You should actually submit 100% WORKING code, not just an attempt at working code.

The Assignment

Your design assignment is broken down into two parts.

Classes

You are required to turn in the following:

Class Headers - You must submit the entire class header material for the MazeCrawler (base class) and the three required derived classes - Right Crawler, Left Crawler, and Random Crawler. These must include appropriate function header comments including pre- and post-conditions. You should remember to include the virtual and pure virtual functions in your classes. You DO NOT need to turn in the headers for the extra credit classes, even if you actually plan on implementing it.

Implementation

You are required to turn in the following:

Right-Hand Crawler - You must turn in a working implementation of your Right-Hand Crawler (as a derived class). So get the hierarchy working with just this ONE class and turn in the implementation for the Maze Crawler (base class) and the Right-Hand Crawler (derived class). These should be 100% working, just like the previous projects.

A template for your design document, p4design.txt, is provided in Ms. Wortman's public directory. Copy that file

/afs/umbc.edu/users/d/a/dana3/pub/CMSC202/p4/p4design.txt to your local directory and fill in the necessary information. Submit your modified p4design.txt file to complete this assignment.

Grading

You will receive feedback from a TA on your design within a few days of turning it in. This will give you an opportunity to address either design or coding flaws before turning in the project. The TA comments will focus on the most important changes to your application that should improve your grade. They will NOT comment on everything you have done incorrectly.

Your p4design.txt file will be compared to the header file or files that you submit when Project 3 is due. Minor changes or those suggested by your TA, to the design are allowed. A minor change might be changing the way in which one or two parameters are passed or even the removal, splitting or addition of one function.

If there are major changes between the design document and the header files that are part of the final project, you will lose 5 points, unless those changes were suggested by your TA. This would indicate that you didn't give sufficient thought to your design before beginning the implementation.

Your p4design.txt file will count as 10% of your project grade (part of the Correctness). If this file is not submitted by its due date, or if you submit a new version after its due date, you will lose all 10 points.