C++ Project

In this class, in lieu of a final examation, you will do a Final Project. In your Final Project, you will demonstrate your mastery of the fundamental concepts taught in this class by applying them to a real-world situation of your choice. The fundamental concepts are: * variables, * data types, * expressions, * flow of control, * conditional statements, * loops, * functions, and * arrays. Your Final Project counts for 33% of your final course grade, so you should start thinking about it very early in the course, and start seriously working on it no later than half way through the course. This note defines the detailed requirements for your class project. In this project, you will write the requirements for a simple computer program, design the program, implement the program in the C++ language, and test it. You will do the project in two phases. Phase I (17% of your class grade) consists of requirements and design. Phase II (16% of your class grade) consists of implementation and testing. Phase I is due two weeks before the end of the term. (A reminder will be posted in Class Announcements.) However, you should not wait until the due date to submit Phase I, since that will leave insufficient time for you to consider my review of your Phase I work and revise your plan accordingly. Phase 2 is due on the last day of the term. Phase I - the Program Plan Your program will perform a useful computation for some practical situation of your choice. You will need to identify the inputs to the computation, and define what outputs are to be computed and displayed, and how those outputs will be computed from the inputs. Your program will ask the user to enter the values of each of the inputs. It will then perform the computations and display the outputs. In prompting the user for input data, your program must display informative prompts written as complete English sentences. Outputs must be displayed so that the outputs read as complete English sentences. Your Program Plan is to consist of six numbered sections, as follows: 1. Context: The context in which the computation is to be performed: who will use the program, and for what business purpose. 2. Inputs: A list of the inputs and their data types 3. Outputs: A list of the outputs and their data types 4. Requirements: The processing requirements, defining how the outputs are to be derived from the inputs. 5. Design: The program design, expressed in pseudocode. Your pseudocode can be in any style and in any degree of formality, but it needs to show me that you have completely thought through how you are going to write the program. You may use flowcharts to support your pseudocode. 6. Test cases: You must identify several sets of test data that together reasonably exercise the features of the program. For each test case, determine (in advance, by hand computation) what is the required output. There are two special requirements: * Your program must contain an outer loop that allows you to test with several sets of test data, without having to restart the program. You will see an example (TestProgramWithUsefulLoop) of how this is done in a few weeks. Pay careful attention to that example, and model that aspect of your program after it. * When writing pseudocode containing conditional statements and loops, use braces {} to group statements into compound statements, as you will see in our many program examples and even in the sample project below. Do not rely on indentation to communicate statement grouping. Now here is why you should get an early start on your project: You may ask me to review drafts of your project plan before final submittal. When you have completed a draft of your plan, post it in your assignments folder under the FP1 tab, and send me an e-mail telling me that you have posted it. I will not grade your plan at this time, but I will review your plan and provide comments by return e-mail, and return your plan ungraded. You can then revise your plan if you choose. When you post a revision, again send me an e-mail saying so, and I will review the revision and provide further comments. Up to two rounds of review and revision are possible. I'll grade only the final version, that is, whatever version you have in your Assignment Folder as of the due date of Phase I. In grading your Project Plan, I will check for these features: * Are all required parts of your plan present, in the proper order, and properly identified? (Each section will be graded separately, so don't leave any out!) * Are the context and business purpose reasonably well explained? * Are the inputs and outputs adequate, and are their proposed data types appropriate? * Is the general description of the computation clearly written? * Will your program demonstrate you mastery of all basic concepts? * Does the pseudocode appear plausible? (I am not going to check it for complete correctness!) * Are the test cases adequate, and have the required outputs for each set of input test data been determined? * Is the plan neatly presented, and is all English grammar, usage, and spelling correct? Phase II - Implementation In Phase II, you will write and test your program. You will write the program "from scratch" (rather than filling in the blanks in a template, as you will be doing in Assignments 1 through 4), but you will be able to model your program on examples that you have seen in previous weeks. In fact, it is quite acceptable for your to start with an example program that is close to what you plan to do, and modify it as needed. (The sample program TestProgramWithUsefulLoop, mentioned earlier, is a good starting point.) When you have written and tested your program, post the C++ Source Code (.cpp) file for your program in your Assignments Folder under the FP2 tab. This is what I will grade. In grading your program, I will check these items: * Does it compile without errors? * Does it work correctly? * Does it demonstrate mastery of all basic concepts? (Incidentally, if you are working on your program, and it won't compile, and you can't figure out what is wrong, you are welcome to e-mail me your .cpp file and I'll have a look at it, as with any of the other assignments.) A Sample Project Plan The purpose of this example to illustrate appropriate organization of a plan. It is a very basic plan, in that it uses conditional statements effectively but there are no loops (other than the outer loop, which doesn't count), functions, or arrays. If well executed in Phase 2, the project as a whole would rate a grade of C. A higher grade could be obtained with a project that uses loops, or functions, or arrays, or a combination of these. Note that this is an example for format and style only. Your subject matter should be different. It is not acceptable to play back this example plan, even with elaborations. Income Tax Computation for Upper Elbonia 1. Context. The republic of Upper Elbonia has a very regressive tax structure. If you are a landowner, your tax is 10% of income in excess of 1000 zings; but if you are a peasant, your tax is 20% of income in excess of 500 zings. (A zing is the monetary unit of Upper Elbonia.) The program is to be used by professional tax preparers to compute a client's tax. 2. Inputs. There are two inputs: the client's income in zings (float) and the client's filing status (char). Filing status will be either L for landowner or P for peasant. 3. Outputs. There is one output, the tax due (float). 4. Processing Requirements. The cases of landowner and peasant have to be considered separately. A landowner with income under 1000 zings owes no tax; if the landowner's income is over 1000 zings, then one has to subtract 1000 from the income and take 10% of the difference. The treatment of the peasant case is similar, but with different numbers. 5. Program design. Declare the following variables: float income, float tax, and char filingStatus. Declare a boolean variable doItOnceMore and a char variable nextAction initialize doItOnceMore to true while doItOnceMore is true { display the prompt "Enter the client's filing status, either L or P: " input the filing status display the prompt "Enter the client's income in zings: " input the income if (filing status is L) { if (income is less than 1000) { tax is zero} else {tax is 10% of (income - 1000)} Display "The tax is " followed by the tax value, followed by "zings." followed by a newline. } else { if (filing status is P) { if (income is less than 500) { tax is zero } else {tax is 20% of (income - 500) } Display "The tax is " followed by the tax value, followed by "zings." followed by a newline. } else {display "You entered an invalid filing status."} Display the prompt "New client? (Y or N)" input a character to the nextAction variable if (nextAction is an N) set doItOnceMore to false } end of while loop 6. Test cases. * Filing status L, income = 37 zings (tax should be zero) * Filing status L, income = 2000 zings (tax should be 100) * Filing status P, income = 499 zings (tax should be zero) * Filing status P, income = 600 zings (tax should be 20) * Filing status X, income = 600 zings (get error message)