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Quickfeed

This course uses Quickfeed, a tool developed at the University of Stavanger for students and teaching staff to manage the submission and validation of lab assignments. All lab submissions from students are handled using Git, a source code management system, and GitHub, a web-based hosting service for Git source repositories. Thus, basic knowledge of these tools are necessary. The procedure used to submit your lab assignments is explained below.

Students push their updated lab submissions to GitHub. After the deadline, the teaching staff will go correct your assignments using predefined criteria. They may also give feedback and tips. This feedback is available through a web interface. The feedback from the Quickfeed system can be used by students to improve their submissions.

Git and GitHub

Git is a distributed revision control and source code management system. Basic knowledge of Git is required for handing in the lab assignments. There are many resources available online for learning Git. A good book is Pro Git by Scott Chacon. The book is available for free here. Chapter 2.1 and 2.2 should contain the necessary information for delivering the lab assignments.

GitHub is a web-based hosting service for software development projects that use the Git revision control system. An introduction to Git and GitHub is available in this video. Students need to sign up for a GitHub account to get access to the needed course material.

Quickfeed Registration

Follow the steps below to register and sign up for the course on Quickfeed.

  1. Go to GitHub and register. A GitHub account is required to sign in to Quickfeed. You can skip this step if you already have an account.

  2. Click the "Sign in with GitHub" button in Quickfeed to register. You will then be taken to GitHub's website.

  3. Approve that our Quickfeed application may have permission to access to the requested parts of your account. It is possible to make a separate GitHub account for only this (and other) courses if you do not want Quickfeed to access your personal one with the requested permissions.

Signing up for the course

  1. Click the Plus (+) menu and select “Join course”. Available courses will be listed.

  2. Find the course and click Enroll.

  3. Wait for the teaching staff to confirm your Quickfeed registration.

  4. You will then be invited to the course organization on GitHub. An invitation will be sent to the email address associated with your GitHub account. Accept the invitation using the received email. Note that emails from GitHub can sometimes take a while to arrive. You can avoid this delay by navigating to the assignments repository and accept the invitation.

  5. Once you have accepted the invitation, you will get your own repository under the course organization on GitHub.

Instructions for submitting a lab assignment

This section give step-by-step instructions on how to submit assignments.

  1. Initially, you will get access to two repositories when you have signed up on Quickfeed. The first is the assignments repository, which is where we publish all lab assignments, skeleton code and additional information. You only have read access to this repository, and its content may change throughout the semester, as we add new assignments or fix problems. The second is your own private repository named username-labs. You will have write access to this repository. Your solution to the assignments should be pushed here.

  2. To get started, decide on a suitable location for your workspace for the course. In this guide we will use $HOME/dat310 as the workspace. Do the following making sure to replace username with your GitHub user name:

    mkdir $HOME/dat310
cd $HOME/dat310
git clone https://github.com/dat310-2023/username-labs assignments
cd assignments
git remote add course-assignments https://github.com/dat310-2023/assignments
git pull course-assignments main

    (you may be asked for username and password on GitHub above.)

    If you have ssh set up you can do the following:

    mkdir $HOME/dat310
cd $HOME/dat310
git clone git@github.com:dat310-2023/username-labs.git assignments
cd assignments
git remote add course-assignments git@github.com:dat310-2023/assignments.git
git pull course-assignments main

  3. To avoid having to type your password every time, follow these steps to set up SSH for GitHub authentication.

  4. One of the most useful git commands is: git status. This will most often be able to tell you what you should be doing with your working copy.

  5. When working with git you typically iterate between the following steps:

    1. Edit files
    2. git status (check to see which files have changed)
    3. git add <edited files>
    4. git status (check that all intended files have been added to the staging area.)
    5. git commit
    6. git status (check that changes have been committed.)

  6. You may iterate over the steps in Step 5 many times. But eventually, you will want to push your changes to GitHub with the following command:

    git push

    Note that this will only push your committed changes!

  7. If you make changes to your own username-labs repository using the GitHub web interface, and want to pull or fetch those changes down to your own computer's (working copy), you can run the following commands:

    git pull

    Or (depending on which merge strategy you prefer)

    git fetch
git rebase

    If there are conflicting changes, you will need to edit the files with conflicts and remove the lines that should not be there, along with the >>>>, ====, and <<<<< lines.

    In later assignments you will work in groups. This approach is also the way that you can download (pull) your group's code changes from GitHub, assuming that another group member has previously pushed it to GitHub.

  8. As time goes by the teaching staff may publish updates to the original assignments repo, e.g. new or updated lab assignments. To fetch and integrate these updates into your own working copy, you will need to run the following commands:

    cd $HOME/dat310/assignments
git pull course-assignments main

    Once again, if there are conflicting changes, you will need to edit the files with conflicts and remove the lines that should not be there, along with the >>>>, ====, and <<<<< lines.

  9. In summary, these are the typical steps that are necessary to make changes to files, add those changes to staging, commit changes and push changes to your own private repository on GitHub:

    cd $HOME/dat310/assignments/assignment-1
vim shell-answers.md
# make your edits and save
git add shell-answers.md
git commit
# This will open an editor for you to write a commit message
# Use for example "Implemented Assignment 1"
git push

  10. After the deadline, your assignment will be reviewed by the teaching stuff. See approval below.

  11. You can check the output by going to the Quickfeed web interface. The results (scores and build log) should be available under assignment's menu item.

  12. If the status of your assignment is revision you have the chance to fix minor issues with your assignment to get it approved. Revisions usually have a short deadline.

Lab Approval

After the lab deadline, we will check your submissions based on a predefined checklist. This check is done manually. If you get 80% score your assignment will be approved. If you do not reach 80%, but you get a reasonable score (> 60%) your assignment is set to revision. A revision deadline will be set, typically a few days after assignments are checked.

Comments when correcting we do leave comments and tips. Check these to improve your assignment.

Inconsistency some times the correction of assignments and individual checkpoints is not fully consistent. This cannot be avoided when multiple people are working on the checking of assignments. However, we make sure that the decisions, i.e. approval or rejection are consistent. Please in form us if you notice inconsistencies in the approval of checkpoints.