Challenge Overview
We (TopCoder) are going to start adding contests subtypes to existing TopCoder Competitions, the goal of adding subtypes is mostly to be able to more accurately segment the types of contests which has some overall implications for the platform. For example, in Assembly we really have many different types of assemblies that have different goals, cater to different skills, need to be reviewed differently, should have separate fulfillment/pricing/duration metrics, etc. It's the same case for Architecture (module vs. system vs. ...) and probably UI Prototype (Web vs. Mobile vs. Desktop vs...).
One of our theories is that some of the struggles we have with Assemblies could be helped if we better formalize what assembly is being used for instead of it being the "Other" category that contains everything that doesn't fit. We hope that by having more specific sub-types that it will increase the success rates of the contests for customers and provide a better experience for competitors.
This is the first contest in a set of release contests to implement the contest subtypes feature. We will start by converting existing Assembly track/category into 4 sub types. Don't let the term 'subtype' mislead you here, what we are doing this release assembly is that changing the existing "assembly" name to one of the subtypes, and we are 3 new 'types', that is a total of 4 assembly subtypes, we call it subtypes because we plan in future to convert all existing contest types into subtypes, and then adding another level in top of these as parent types, the parent type will group the sub-types. The reason for not adding new table to handle sub-types is that we think it will be easier to convert existing types into sub-types rather than adding new table and making major changes to existing code base.
The Assembly subtypes are :
- Module Assembly
- Release Assembly
- Prototype Assembly
- System Assembly
In this assembly, you will update TC cockpit to add these 4 to "launch new contest" flow. Update TC to aggregate the 4 subtypes to be displayed under Assembly Competitions pages. Update Online Review to show the 4 types under the Assembly tab.
Full Specification : http://apps.topcoder.com/wiki/display/docs/Release+Assembly+-+TopCoder+Assembly+Track+SubTypes+Integration
Final Submission Guidelines
Full Specification : http://apps.topcoder.com/wiki/display/docs/Release+Assembly+-+TopCoder+Assembly+Track+SubTypes+Integration