Project 3 Software Requirements Specification

Overview

Some of the potential enhancements you may be making to the basic system during the semester:

• Providing two kinds of questions: multiple choice, multiple answer (i.e. checkbox-based) and multiple choice, single answer (i.e. radio button-based).
• Reading and writing multiple QA files.
• Organizing sets of questions into quizzes.
• Computed answers. Here you provide a formula, such as how to convert fahrenheit to centrigrade, and a range of acceptable fahrenheit values. The system then generates questions asking you to to convert a fahrenheit value within the range to its equivalent centrigrade value, and uses the formula to check your response.
• Downloading QA files from the web.
• Recording the elapsed time and comparing it to a recommended value.
• Recording scores in a file. (Useful to assess progress).
• Randomized presentation of all questions.
• Randomized presentation of all answers to a question.
• Randomized selection of a subset of questions. (i.e. any 5 of the 10 questions).
• Support for embedded graphics such as gif or jpeg files in questions.
• Support for embedded applets in questions.
• Assistive technologies.
• Palm Pilot version using the KVM for Java.
• History-based question selection, based upon prior quiz results to focus on questions that were incorrectly answered previously.

Project 3 Increment: Answering and scoring individual questions

A friendly word of advice: in the design of this extension, think ahead to later when you will be implementing a GUI interface to PSAE. Try to implement this extension in terms of a common API to both the CLI user interface and the GUI user interface.

Here are the specific requirements for this project.

1. First, the software must conform to all of the requirements stated in prior projects. This includes coding standards, JavaDoc standards, command line argument processing, etc. Your Project 3 software must pass all of the test cases created for prior projects. (Note that some test cases may need to be changed to conform to the new constraint of title uniqueness.)

2. This is version 3.0. You should have a single (typically static) string instance somewhere in your program storing this version number. This single string instance should be used whenever the version number is printed. It is a design error for you to create multiple copies of the version number string. Remember to update the first line of your output to refer to this version string.

3. The software must ensure that each question has a unique :TITLE string, as documented in an updated version of the PSAE File Format Specification.

4. The software must support the optional command line argument "-answer".

   The -answer argument takes two parameters: a string indicating the title, and a single integer indicating which answers the user indicated to be correct.

   If the supplied string does not exactly match any of the loaded :TITLE strings, then the program should provide an informative error message and terminate execution. (Note that the entire set of loaded questions are searched, not just those in the current selection set as specified by the -diffSet command.)

   The integer argument to -answer encodes which answers the user indicates to be correct in the following way. Assign the value 1 to the first :ANSWER declaration for the indicated question. Assign the second :ANSWER declaration the value 2. Assign the third :ANSWER declaration the value 4. And so on--the nth answer gets the value 2**n-1.

   To determine the set of answers checked as valid, you sum the values. Thus, the integer value 0 indicates that no answers were checked. The integer value 1 indicates that only the first answer was checked. The integer value 3 indicates that the first two answers (1+2) were checked. The integer value 7 indicates that the first three answers were checked (1+2+4) were checked. The integer value 6 indicates that the second and third answers were checked (2+4). And so on.

   If you think about this numeric encoding for a little while, you should be able to come up with a simple algorithm that enables you to test this integer against the answer set and determine what's correct and what's not correct.

   More than one -answer argument can be provided on the same command line.

   If there are only two answers for the given question, then the possible legal integer values are 0, 1, 2, and 3. Any other integer values should be considered as a command line error in this case. In general, for a question with n answers, the possible legal integer values range from 0 to (2**n) - 1.

   The program should print out a single line in response to each -answer argument. The line should specify the title of the question being tested, and the amount of credit awarded for that question. Credit should be awarded in the following way:

   • If any incorrect answer is selected, you get no credit regardless of whether correct answers were selected or not.
   • If no incorrect answers are selected, then the amount of credit is the total of the credit awarded for each answer that was selected. For example, if a question has two correct answers, and were given percentage values of 40 and 60, then if the user specified only the first correct answer, they would get 40. If they specified only the second, they would get 60. If they specified both, they would get 100. If they specified any incorrect answer, they get 0.

5. As always, you must handle incorrect command line arguments.

Examples

1. A correct answer on a single question.

   % java -jar johnson-P3.jar -qa test.qa -answer "Question01" 1
   Personal Self-Assessment Environment V3.0 Philip Johnson
   Loading question title: Question01
   Loading question title: Question02
   Loading question title: Question03
   Loading question title: Question04
   Loading question title: Question05
   Loading question title: Question06
   Loading question title: Question07
   Loading question title: Question08
   Loading question title: Question09
   Loading question title: Question10
   10 questions successfully loaded.
   Answering 'Question01': 100
   

2. Two correct answers:

   % java -jar johnson-P3.jar -qa test.qa -answer "Question01" 1 -answer "Question03" 4
   Personal Self-Assessment Environment V3.0 Philip Johnson
   Loading question title: Question01
   Loading question title: Question02
   Loading question title: Question03
   Loading question title: Question04
   Loading question title: Question05
   Loading question title: Question06
   Loading question title: Question07
   Loading question title: Question08
   Loading question title: Question09
   Loading question title: Question10
   10 questions successfully loaded.
   Answering 'Question01': 100
   Answering 'Question03': 100
   

3. A correct and incorrect answer:

   % java -jar johnson-P3.jar -qa test.qa -answer "Question01" 1 -answer "Question03" 7
   Personal Self-Assessment Environment V3.0 Philip Johnson
   Loading question title: Question01
   Loading question title: Question02
   Loading question title: Question03
   Loading question title: Question04
   Loading question title: Question05
   Loading question title: Question06
   Loading question title: Question07
   Loading question title: Question08
   Loading question title: Question09
   Loading question title: Question10
   10 questions successfully loaded.
   Answering 'Question01': 100
   Answering 'Question03': 0
   

Note that other command line arguments could also be supplied.