CST338 Week 3

Data Discourse: Peer Review of HW01

Collaboration and Teamwork

For this weeks assignment to review the histogram projects of our peers, I had the pleasure of working with Saria Kabbour, Jess Hammond, and Gary Keupper. Our team was initially formed in CST300, and we have maintained contact even after the course concluded. 

Feedback

My team was mostly generous in their evaluation of my project. I did receive some suggestions from Gary and Saria about breaking apart comments for methods that have lengthy implementations rather than bunching them above the method. I have a practice of incorporating project briefs into the program as comments. This helps me as I am writing code by providing a pseudocode framework and serves to detail what the code is doing once I have implemented it. I agree with the assessment from my team and I realize that this practice would help me during implementation as well. The context of the instruction decreases with every block added to meet the expectations of the brief.

Hardest Unit Test

The unit test I had the greatest difficulty on was the debug() test. All the tests were passing, but the output did not match the output shown in the brief. I was getting two prints for the debug() method and I assumed that a double read was the cause of the problem. After hours of research, three entire versions of histogram.java, and 20 Git commits I decided to look at the unit tests closely. The debug test was calling debug() twice.

Test Functions and Suggestions

The tests cover most of the expected functionality, but they could be expanded to include edge cases and empty files. An additional suggestion would be to revise the brief description for the expected output of the debug() method.

Challenges

There were three challenging portions of this project: The sort(), debug(), and display() methods. Among these, debug() was the most difficult for me, followed by display(). Methods that involve specific formatting expectations can be challenging, and most of my peers found this method to be the most challenging one.

Reflection

What I am most proud of is my ability to successfully implement 3 functioning variants of the histogram program. There are several ways to implement programs, but I need to work on my programming approach to ensure that I understand what the expected outputs are and what the tests are looking for, so I don’t try to brute force implementations and attempt to debug large portions of code all at once.