MyISERN-1.1

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This is another very challenging assignment. Although I managed to accomplish all the tasks, I feel strongly there are many improvements can be made.

The hardest part of this assignment would be the unclear requirement. Although the requirements are posted on the course page, many of them are not clarified, especially the one that asks for link verification. Even though Professor Johnson answered it in the discussion, it still left me quite a bit of confusion. It seems like it could be done in several ways, and there are pros and cons in each way. I think this is what will happen in real life too. The customer do not always give clear requirement of what they want, or more often, even the customer themselves do not know what they want.

Another hard part of this assignment was the cooperation in the group. We started working for the different parts of the assignment, and then very soon we encountered the conflict problem while we were trying to commit our own files. Although we worked in different code, the conflict still appeared somehow. I think for student group project, commit conflict will be more often since students tend to work together around the same time and commit the code at the same time. Anyhow, we figured out the problem by merging or all updated to a same version.

Last hard part of this assignment is the testing-base design. Since our code are supposed to be tested by JUnit, I tried to avoid using void methods as much as I can. However, the requirements of this assignment seem to be still printing stuff out on the standard output. I could have made the methods return some values, such as true or false, or even a list or a map, but I really did not see the purpose of doing that. It simple violates the nature of the requirement. If the requirement is to print out something, then the methods should print out something without returning anything. After a little bit debate, we stick with the void methods.

For the possible improvement during the next assignment, I would first make sure what the framework of the program would be like, then list out all the classes, methods, and variables that will be implemented. In this way, everyone could work differently but still go towards a same goal. Besides, I would try to find a balance between the design and testing, and avoid the usage of void methods. After all, they are not good in the sense that they cannot be tested easily. Also, one thing I will definitely do is the issue organizations. In this assignment, our issue management was very poor, and I did not figure out how to edit an issue till the very end. It was simply a mess. In my opinion, the red team did very well on this. They divided the issue according to the requirement, thus for every commit there is always an issue to be related. This can avoid the redundant creation of the issues.

Overall, this assignment is not easy, but as usual, I learned a great deal of stuff from it.