21.MyISERN-1.2

The goal of this assignment is to continue developing our group-based software engineering skills and begin developing the ability to present our system status to "management".

Distribution package

All tasks were completed!

What was difficult about this assignment?
In my opinion, there were not many real challenges when coding this assignment. However, I found that there was lots of code to write. The three add methods where pretty easy to implement. But the edit was a little bit more difficult. Therefore, to change the state we decided to make the xmlLoader object static. When the user finally decides not to save the changes, the xmlLoader object gets assigned to the previous state, the state before the user started the edit. Another, difficult task was to write test cases for user input. With our knowledge and tools it is impossible. Since we did not have enough time to learn new tools, we decided to write good test cases from the black box perspective. However, the user input or standard output is not test and therefore the Emma coverage suffers. This does not mean that our program doesn't perform well! In addition, it was pretty hard to verify if all the links between Collaborations, Organizations, and Researchers are kept valid after adding new instances. We decided to perform checks on empty name field, uniqueness of id, year, and verify that organization exists when adding new Researchers and Collaborations. However, we did not make sure that all the Researchers exist when adding Collaborations or Organizations since this would go into an infinite loop, never solving the problem.

What problems were encountered in organizing the group and carrying out the work?
There were not really any problems with the group. We all decided to start on this assignment early. The first add method we got working on Wednesday and Thursday morning all the other add methods were finished. Then we implemented edit and after that we finished the marshaling methods. However, this was only the code, and we still had to improve the user interface as well as add all the informations.

What will you do differently during the next Milestone to improve the process and the product of your efforts?
Our group work was good and if anything I would like to have more time to meet with the group members to implement the code together. I find that if we work in a group the code gets more efficient and also it is quicker implemented than if a single person thinks and implements all the code. On the other hand when writing all the program by yourself the classes may be better distributed and redundant code is easier to omit. Therefore, one thing that comes to my mind as an improvement would be to actually draw a class hierarchy diagram and follow it for the implementation to omit writing redundant code.