Skills Test Instructions

Skills Tests are short, timed exams that will have students perform actual coding tasks using their laptop software development environments. A key aim of the Skills Tests is to evaluate whether students can perform core development tasks quickly and correctly. Such skill and efficiency is essential to being an effective software development team member.

1. The Rules

• No devices, except for your laptop.
• Paper notes are allowed. Having digital notes on your laptop is allowed.
• Closed neighbor.
• No texting/messaging/posting. Searching the web for documentation and existing forum posts is OK.

This is an exam, and violations of the rules will be treated as academic dishonesty.

2. Preparing Your Development Environment for the Test

2.1. Way Before the First Test

You should need to perform these steps only one time before doing the first Skills Test.

• Install and set up the OBS screen-capture software as per the course instructions.

• Download the Skills Test repo and initialize the project.

  1. If you have not done so already, you must complete the development environment setup steps in Homework H1.

  2. Open GitHub repo page: https://github.com/memphis-cs/skills-test-2019-fall. This repo is publicly readable, but you will not be able to push to it.

  3. Start up your VM (vagrant up), log into the VM (vagrant ssh), and change directory to workspace (cd workspace/).

  4. Clone the Skills Test GitHub repo using this command:

      git clone https://github.com/memphis-cs/skills-test-2019-fall.git
     

     If you have set up key-based authentication for GitHub, you may alternatively use the SSH version of the repo URL.

  5. Change directory to skills-test-2019-fall (cd skills-test-2019-fall).

  6. Install the Bundler gem (gem install bundler).

  7. Install the project’s gem dependencies (bundle install).

  8. Install the project’s JavaScript dependencies (yarn install).

  9. Create the PostgreSQL databases for the Skills Test project:

      sudo -i -u postgres psql -c "CREATE DATABASE skills_test_development OWNER vagrant;"
      sudo -i -u postgres psql -c "CREATE DATABASE skills_test_test OWNER vagrant;"
      sudo -i -u postgres psql -c "CREATE DATABASE skills_test_production OWNER vagrant;"
     

  10. Migrate and reset the databases:

       rails db:migrate
       rails db:reset
      

2.2. Right Before the Start of a Test

• Get your VM ready: vagrant up, vagrant ssh, and cd into your workspace/skills-test-2019-fall folder.

• Check to make sure your working directory is clean (git status). If it’s not clean, you must make it clean. There are a number of ways to go about this, and the best choice depends on your exact situation. One common approach would simply be to commit all changes (git add -A, git commit -m "...").

• Launch OBS, and get ready to record.

• Launch your web browser, and open https://www.google.com/ in one tab and https://github.com/memphis-cs/skills-test-2019-fall in another tab.

Finally, refresh the Skills Test GitHub repo page until a the current $TESTID branch becomes available under the Branch: ... dropdown. (Substitute $TESTID with whatever the ID of the current Skills Test is; for example, for the first Skills Test, you would substitute $TESTID with s01a.)

When the branch for $TESTID appears in the dropdown, click it to switch to that branch. Once you’ve done that, the README.md file should provide the instructions for the test.