Every week, you are expected to turn in a few key things that we need to track your progress for your grade, and just as importantly, to help you out.
(Note: WIP means "Work In Progress")
Every week, we want you to post any changes you've made to Review Board. Especially during the early days, these might be very small changes, or full of things like print statements or commented out code.
The goal of posting changes early is so that we can see is you working. The WIP patches let us see that you're making progress (even if that progress is just learning how the existing code works). They also let us catch when you're going off into the weeds (there's nothing worse than polishing up a change only to discover you didn't understand some crucial piece, and have to throw it out). Each week, you update your review request with your changes, and we see you moving forward.
We ask that when a change is in its early stages, you communicate that by putting "[WIP]" in the summary. When a change is marked as such, we'll look to make sure you're on the right track, but we won't be doing serious code review. Once you start to feel confident about a code change, you should remove the "WIP" marker. At that point, we'll take a serious look at the code and give it thorough review. This doesn't mean you should wait until you think it's perfect, just that you think it won't require any big rewrites.
Another benefit to making sure you've posted your work every week is that it gives you some disaster recovery. We've definitely had someone work for two months on a change and then their hard drive exploded into pieces.
Every week, you're expected to send a status report on your progress. These will be collected on a tool that we've put together called "Student Sonar".
You can access the tool at https://students.reviewboard.org/. This will have you log in with your Slack credentials, so you need to have connected to Slack first. After logging in, you'll see "My Status Reports" in the left-hand side menu.