Spring '22 Week 8
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Edited Transcript
Hello, and welcome to the week eight announcements video for CC 410 in Spring 2022. So this week coming up is spring break. So we’re talking about things that are happening after spring break. This is one of the larger modules where this week you’ll be covering things like design patterns and test doubles, you might also know them as mock objects. And so this whole milestone is about a lot of cool programming concepts that are related to object oriented programming, but help extend your ability to develop programs that people can understand and to develop your ability to write unit tests that can actually test around those objects. So this is the rather large milestone, this is probably the largest milestone of new content that you haven’t seen before in this class. And because of that, I give you two weeks plus you have spring break. So you really have three weeks to work on restaurant milestone six. So the next milestone is not actually due till the end of March. However, it’s really important that you budget your time well, this is a milestone that is probably the second to most difficult assignment in the class. And the success rate of actually completing all of the milestone objectives on this one has been pretty low. So I encourage you to start early and work on it a little bit at a time, and make sure that you’ve budgeted enough time to work on this project together at all done. Also the first of April is when we’ll have our third final project meeting by then you should have locked in your project idea and hopefully started a little bit of coding. And then throughout April, you’ll have a lot more time to work on finishing out your final project.
So milestone six, it’s all about adding two big options to this project. The first thing we’re adding is orders for entering an object to keep track of the order that a user is actually constructing in that sidebar in your GUI. And then we’ll also create the ability for them to have combos where you have a wrap aside and a drink and a combo order that you can put together that comes with a discount. We’re really doing this to test out design patterns, which are common ways that we can build certain things in our program. So you’ll get to work with the factory method pattern, the builder pattern, the singleton pattern and the iterator pattern. In this particular milestone, you’re also going to do unit tests using test doubles. So mock objects and things that you can use. But other than that, there’s going to be few changes to the GUI itself, it’s mainly wiring up the bits to handle orders and combos, and things like that.
So because this is a big milestone, I figured I’d give you a few tips on how to complete it. If you look at the milestone, there’s really three major things that you’re going to work on, I encourage you to do orders first. So figure out the order object, how you can get that put together, how you can build an order in your sidebar, and get that all working, that’s really the important part to get working first, then you can work on adding combos, you’ll add some more buttons to your your UI, you’ll build the combo builder, and you’ll work that in. But if your orders are already working combos should just fit right into that with a couple of minor changes. Once you get all of that working, then the third thing you can do is switch your panels over to use a panel factory. If that doesn’t work, it doesn’t really break anything that is needed in the last milestone. And so I really encourage you to get orders and combos working for sure. And work on the panel factory. It’s not that complicated once you get it in there. But if anything has to be given on this project, I would probably leave out the panel factory. The other thing I really encourage you to do is write unit tests as you go. So once you get the orders working, you can unit test the orders before you ever actually implemented in your GUI, and so on. And then also document and fix your style as you go, you’ve got automated testing tools. And so every time you get something working, take a minute, get it unit tested, get it documented, make sure the style is fixed. And that will make it easier as you go along. So you don’t have that saved for the very end where you have to spend hours doing nothing but fixing style. I dislike that part of programming. And so I think it’s a lot easier to just build that in as you go. Or maybe even learn how to code with really good style in the first place so that you don’t have to do as many fixes later on.
So this module continues some of the testing issues that I talked about last time. This is simply due to the Codio boxes, having limited memory and now that we’re dealing with GUI objects, especially running unit tests is very intensive on memory. In Java, if it looks like your tests crash, you can refresh the page, do gradle –stop in the terminal to stop any running Gradle processes. And then you can go to the Project menu and hit restart box, which will restart the Linux system behind Codio itself. In Python, we can just run our tests in batches and I give an updated tox file that you can tweak a little bit that lets you run your tests in batches. The other thing that’s new this semester I just posted a few videos on how to run your projects outside of Codio. So if you so choose, you can watch those videos and download your project to your local system and work on those either in PyCharm or IntelliJ or Visual Studio Code. The videos I posted are reflective for a Windows environment for Mac or Linux it should be very similar. If you want videos for Mac and Linux please let me know and I will do my best to work with you to get those videos put together. But those are all options that you can use to make your experience a little bit easier when you’re writing unit tests on this project.
So looking ahead after March, we’re going to go into April. Module 10 and 11 is all about external libraries and releases. And so we’re going to work in the next milestone with an external library. It’s a library that represents a cash register system. It’s something that I wrote and you’ll be integrating that into your system. And so the next milestone will also be a two week milestone. So we’ll have one milestone due on March 28. And then the second milestone will be due the second week of April. These are the two biggest milestones in this class. And then after that, things wind down quite a bit. And then after that, we’ll go into things like web API’s and some of the other topics in this class.
So we’re finally at the halfway mark of the semester. It’s week eight spring break is coming up next week. There’s nothing do over spring break. There’s no expectation that you work on anything in spring break because you do have the two weeks after spring break to work on this next milestone. That said if you want to make things easier on yourself, get a head start on the milestone feel free. I will try and be available as much as I can over spring break. So I’ll be watching my email and watching discord. It may take me longer than usual to get back to you but I should be able to answer questions. Otherwise, I wish you the best of luck if you’re traveling over spring break, stay safe, be healthy and come back ready to go in the last half of the semester. And I will look forward to seeing you again in a couple weeks.