Every program must be accompanied by a saved ``Interactions window'' (I'll explain how to do this in the first week) showing how the program works on test cases. Programs with inadequate or poorly-chosen test cases will lose points (we'll discuss how to choose good test cases); programs turned in with no test runs at all will lose lots of points.
Having done my share of programming, I know that sometimes you hit a brick wall and cannot get the thing to work for love or money. If this happens, turn in the program together with a concise description of how the program fails, what you've tried in your attempts to fix it, and how those attempts didn't succeed. You won't get full credit, but if I'm convinced that you're working on it diligently, you'll get some partial credit. Note that ``how the program fails'' does not mean saying ``I got an error message;'' you need to tell me which error message you got, when you saw it, and what you think the error message means. Similarly, if the program fails by producing wrong answers, you need to tell me when it produces wrong answers (are they all wrong, or just in a few cases?), how they are wrong (e.g. are all the numbers consistently higher than you expected, are they the negatives of the correct answers, or are they all over the place with no apparent pattern?), and your speculations on how such an error might have arisen. I'm requiring all this not because I'm mean and horrible, but because by the time you've written all this down, you may have enough information to actually fix the problem, which is much better than turning it in incomplete.
I also expect you to keep track of the time you spend on various aspects of programming, how many and what kinds of defects you encounter, etc. For each assignment, I'll tell you which tracking information is required. The easiest way to turn in this information is through a collection of on-line forms, which I'll show you how to use. Indeed, I recommend that while you're programming, you have a Web browser running the forms in the background, so you can easily record each defect and each block of time before you forget about it. Failure to turn in this tracking information will lower your grade for that assignment.
