Activity of Sept. 27, 2010

Post date: Sep 26, 2010 5:38:52 PM

We have a rather long warm-up first. Afterwards, we will discuss the second page of the not so recent test, the current Algorithms Project, and possibly variables. Keep the test review, but we'll postpone the rest in favor of something that was scheduled for later in the course, but is proving to be of more immediate need: Quality Assurance, which is Project 9.

We're going to break the mold in several places this week. First, our reading does not come from the normal textbook, but from Bruce Eckel's Thinking in Java. This book was written for real (aspiring) programmers and takes more of an engineering than scientific approach which makes a very interesting contrast. Download the file, unzip it, open TIJ3.htm, and navigate to Chapter 15: Discovering Problems. There you should read

• • The introduction which appears just after the chapter title

  • Unit Testing up to (but not including) A Simple Testing Framework and then again JUnit up to the next section

  • Improving reliability with assertions up to (but not including) Relaxing DBC.

  • Debugging

  • Summary

Secondly, we will begin working with BlueJ and use its debugger to help up peer into our running programs and explain why they are acting so strangely. The program is installed on the school laptops and can be downloaded from the Development Tools section of the Links Page.

In addition to taking advantage of its debugger, we will profit from its interfaces with JUnit and Javadoc. We will migrate the assertion-based testing of the Predictive Text Project to JUnit-style testing and also write documentation for our code. Thus, rather than write entirely new code, we will perfect (and complete) what we're already working on.