Milestone release
User Guide
Developer Guide
Release Notes
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.
Monday, October 15, 2007
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
MyISERN Review
I was assigned to review Jung Kim’s code this time, but by the time I was writing this review, I could not find the entry from his blog for the MyISERN assignment. Therefore, I went to his team’s Google project page to download the source code.
Installation Review:
The source code is downloaded successfully. There is no wiki page for the user guide or something like that, but after all this was not required in the previous assignment. I had no problem at all while trying to import the project into eclipse. I invoked the verify test in the command prompt, and it ran successfully. This implied the Checkstyle, PMD, FindBugs, and JUnit tests should all be passed.
Since the first MyISERN assignment is relatively simple, there is not much code added in the program. I can easily understand the code.
For the program execution, I invoked “ant jar” and it creates a jar without any problem. Then I invoke the jar file by “java –jar” command. The tables were printed out correctly. Overall, the program does what it supposes to do, and it functions correctly.
Code format and conventions review:
There are a few violations in the code:
Test case review:
Black box perspective: The test does print out the table as expected. Other than that, the number of researchers, organizations, and collaboration are also tested, but that is given from the initial files. However, printing out the table is the only objective of the assignment, and the data are all given, there is not much black box testing can be done.
White box perspective: The Emma report is as follow:
Emma Coverage summary
class: 100% (1/1)
method: 90% (9/10)
block: 98% (497/508)
line: 96% (104/108)
Although the coverage is not 100%, it does not mean the testing is not sufficient from our experience of code coverage. By inspecting the testing case, I found out the reason for the missing coverage is that the main method has not been tested. However, since main method is “evil”, and JUnit is almost useless when it comes to testing of the standard output, I consider the author has done a fairly good job on the testing. Also, there is one line of error checking code is not covered. As mentioned above, the data for the assignment is given, thus an error input cannot be produce and the error checking will never be executed.
Break da buggah: I could break the program by running it outside its original folder, because the XML data files are defined such that they are located within the original folder. However, this seems a little bit too extreme to me because I think only a programmer that knows the internal structure of the program would know this could cause the program to fail.
Summary and Lessons Learned:
Overall, the program is pretty well written. It functions correctly and safely. One lesson I learned is that when the data is given, there is still no guarantee that the program will not go wrong. Furthermore, things tend to change a lot in real life, and errors usually emerge during the change. Another lessoned I learned is the importance of documentation. Not only the meaningful comment in the code is necessary, but also a user guide or manual is very helpful.
Installation Review:
The source code is downloaded successfully. There is no wiki page for the user guide or something like that, but after all this was not required in the previous assignment. I had no problem at all while trying to import the project into eclipse. I invoked the verify test in the command prompt, and it ran successfully. This implied the Checkstyle, PMD, FindBugs, and JUnit tests should all be passed.
Since the first MyISERN assignment is relatively simple, there is not much code added in the program. I can easily understand the code.
For the program execution, I invoked “ant jar” and it creates a jar without any problem. Then I invoke the jar file by “java –jar” command. The tables were printed out correctly. Overall, the program does what it supposes to do, and it functions correctly.
Code format and conventions review:
There are a few violations in the code:
| File | Lines | Violation | Comment |
| MyIsernXmlLoader | 152, 169, 196, * | EJS #7 | Unnecessary blank line within a method |
| MyIsernXmlLoader | 142, 159, 194, * | EJS #9 | Pick more meaningful variable name or give it a comment |
| MyIsernXmlLoader | 191 | EJS #27 | Name for collection should be plural |
Test case review:
Black box perspective: The test does print out the table as expected. Other than that, the number of researchers, organizations, and collaboration are also tested, but that is given from the initial files. However, printing out the table is the only objective of the assignment, and the data are all given, there is not much black box testing can be done.
White box perspective: The Emma report is as follow:
Emma Coverage summary
class: 100% (1/1)
method: 90% (9/10)
block: 98% (497/508)
line: 96% (104/108)
Although the coverage is not 100%, it does not mean the testing is not sufficient from our experience of code coverage. By inspecting the testing case, I found out the reason for the missing coverage is that the main method has not been tested. However, since main method is “evil”, and JUnit is almost useless when it comes to testing of the standard output, I consider the author has done a fairly good job on the testing. Also, there is one line of error checking code is not covered. As mentioned above, the data for the assignment is given, thus an error input cannot be produce and the error checking will never be executed.
Break da buggah: I could break the program by running it outside its original folder, because the XML data files are defined such that they are located within the original folder. However, this seems a little bit too extreme to me because I think only a programmer that knows the internal structure of the program would know this could cause the program to fail.
Summary and Lessons Learned:
Overall, the program is pretty well written. It functions correctly and safely. One lesson I learned is that when the data is given, there is still no guarantee that the program will not go wrong. Furthermore, things tend to change a lot in real life, and errors usually emerge during the change. Another lessoned I learned is the importance of documentation. Not only the meaningful comment in the code is necessary, but also a user guide or manual is very helpful.
Monday, October 8, 2007
MyISERN-1.0
The source code can be downloaded from here.
Our Google project page is here.
The objective of this assignment is to get us started on building the social network application for ISERN, as well as start using SVN and Google project hosting. In this assignment, I learned about JAXB, XML Schema, group software development process, and I am more familiar with SVN, project hosting and XML.
JAXB: This application is very powerful when it pairs up with XML Schema. It took me a couple of hours to figure out how JAXB Marshaller class works. It basically provides a bridge to connect Java and XML. We can easily convert data that is defined by XML Schema to Java classes, and it is done almost automatically.
XML Schema: This is a way to define data in XML as far as what I understand right now. It might seem a little bit complicated at first, but it really makes sense once it is converted to Java classes by using the XJC compiler. Since XML is becoming a more and more popular standard to hold data, I think it would be very useful to learn about and get familiar with Schema.
SVN: It works very nicely for team development. By having a master copy of the working code, we can still share code and make progress without meeting face to face. I personally keep the source code for commit and update in a separate folder than the workspace folder in eclipse. This turned out to be a good choice I think, because some of my classmates informed me they are having problem when they commit or update the code straight from the workspace folder in eclipse.
Google project hosting: This turned out to be a much better service than what I expected. It helps us organize the project in a consistent manner. However, I do not really understand the purpose of the Wiki pages functionality. They seem to be only some text files with a .wiki extension. Also, the naming restriction of these Wiki pages is quite weird: It does not allow spaces or some special characters. Nonetheless, Google project hosting is satisfactory for me.
Group software development: I am lucky enough to have a good group for this assignment. We meet twice for long period of time during school, which made us finish most parts of assignment. We also tried pair-programming during the time we meet, and it was very helpful. Many errors or potential bugs, which might take several minutes to discover if we writing the code individually, were caught right at the time when we were writing the code. I do think it improve the speed of producing high quality code. For the Scrum methodology approach, since we were doing pair-programming, many tasks were accomplished together, but we still tried our best to make everyone to do everything.
JUnit: Once again, I feel a little powerless when it comes to void method test case in JUnit, especially the System.out.println() method. Since the objective of this assignment is to print out tables, which obviously should be using void method, the test cases are more or less impractical. They seem to be just for the purpose of fulfilling the Emma coverage. We tried to use Boolean as a return value to do error checking for these print methods, but the data in this assignment is all given by the XML files, thus we cannot even produce an error case in the testing, which makes the error case never being executed.
Our Google project page is here.
The objective of this assignment is to get us started on building the social network application for ISERN, as well as start using SVN and Google project hosting. In this assignment, I learned about JAXB, XML Schema, group software development process, and I am more familiar with SVN, project hosting and XML.
JAXB: This application is very powerful when it pairs up with XML Schema. It took me a couple of hours to figure out how JAXB Marshaller class works. It basically provides a bridge to connect Java and XML. We can easily convert data that is defined by XML Schema to Java classes, and it is done almost automatically.
XML Schema: This is a way to define data in XML as far as what I understand right now. It might seem a little bit complicated at first, but it really makes sense once it is converted to Java classes by using the XJC compiler. Since XML is becoming a more and more popular standard to hold data, I think it would be very useful to learn about and get familiar with Schema.
SVN: It works very nicely for team development. By having a master copy of the working code, we can still share code and make progress without meeting face to face. I personally keep the source code for commit and update in a separate folder than the workspace folder in eclipse. This turned out to be a good choice I think, because some of my classmates informed me they are having problem when they commit or update the code straight from the workspace folder in eclipse.
Google project hosting: This turned out to be a much better service than what I expected. It helps us organize the project in a consistent manner. However, I do not really understand the purpose of the Wiki pages functionality. They seem to be only some text files with a .wiki extension. Also, the naming restriction of these Wiki pages is quite weird: It does not allow spaces or some special characters. Nonetheless, Google project hosting is satisfactory for me.
Group software development: I am lucky enough to have a good group for this assignment. We meet twice for long period of time during school, which made us finish most parts of assignment. We also tried pair-programming during the time we meet, and it was very helpful. Many errors or potential bugs, which might take several minutes to discover if we writing the code individually, were caught right at the time when we were writing the code. I do think it improve the speed of producing high quality code. For the Scrum methodology approach, since we were doing pair-programming, many tasks were accomplished together, but we still tried our best to make everyone to do everything.
JUnit: Once again, I feel a little powerless when it comes to void method test case in JUnit, especially the System.out.println() method. Since the objective of this assignment is to print out tables, which obviously should be using void method, the test cases are more or less impractical. They seem to be just for the purpose of fulfilling the Emma coverage. We tried to use Boolean as a return value to do error checking for these print methods, but the data in this assignment is all given by the XML files, thus we cannot even produce an error case in the testing, which makes the error case never being executed.
Thursday, October 4, 2007
CM Practice
Project Homepage
Discussion Group
SVN Group
Comparing to the WebSpider assignment, this is a relatively easy assignment. I was able to accomplish all three tasks. Although this task is simple, I still encountered some difficulties.
The first problem for me was the authentication of the tortoiseSVN. Thanks to the Prof. Johnson's help, I figured out that it was the HTTPS prefix of the URL screwed me over. When the HTTPS is used, that means an encrypted connection between the browser and website is established. In the HTTP case, the connection is unencrypted, and thus the write access is granted. Although I have heard about this concept before, this is actually the first time I encounter a problem caused by it.
The second problem is the mailing list setting for my project. The PDF file from the class website is unclear and different from what I see in the website, which made me a little confusing. Fortunately with the help from my classmates, I am able to solve the problem. I also commit twice to the SVN to make sure that there is a notification sends out to the mailing list whenever I do a commit. It would be much better that Google can integrate this functionality into its project hosting page.
From this assignment, I learned how to host a project use Google hosting, and I clarify the mechanism of how the SVN works. I had used SVN in a previous class, but there were a lot of troubles because the instructor did not teach us anything about it. Terms like trunk, commit, and configuration really confused me. This time I actually realize the advantages of using SVN, which I believe it will be a great help to my group project in the rest of the semester.
Discussion Group
SVN Group
Comparing to the WebSpider assignment, this is a relatively easy assignment. I was able to accomplish all three tasks. Although this task is simple, I still encountered some difficulties.
The first problem for me was the authentication of the tortoiseSVN. Thanks to the Prof. Johnson's help, I figured out that it was the HTTPS prefix of the URL screwed me over. When the HTTPS is used, that means an encrypted connection between the browser and website is established. In the HTTP case, the connection is unencrypted, and thus the write access is granted. Although I have heard about this concept before, this is actually the first time I encounter a problem caused by it.
The second problem is the mailing list setting for my project. The PDF file from the class website is unclear and different from what I see in the website, which made me a little confusing. Fortunately with the help from my classmates, I am able to solve the problem. I also commit twice to the SVN to make sure that there is a notification sends out to the mailing list whenever I do a commit. It would be much better that Google can integrate this functionality into its project hosting page.
From this assignment, I learned how to host a project use Google hosting, and I clarify the mechanism of how the SVN works. I had used SVN in a previous class, but there were a lot of troubles because the instructor did not teach us anything about it. Terms like trunk, commit, and configuration really confused me. This time I actually realize the advantages of using SVN, which I believe it will be a great help to my group project in the rest of the semester.
Monday, October 1, 2007
WebSpider Review
The package I reviewed is from Laura Matsuo. The following is my result for the reviews:
1. Installation Review
I downloaded the zip file from Laura's blog, and the installation process went very smoothly with only a few modifications, such as renaming the files and folders. I noticed that the zip file comes with 3 text files: a.txt, b.txt, c.txt. They seem to be some logging output files, but I think they are only for intermediate testing purpose. Also, there are 2 jar files already included in the package: webspider.jar and webspider-lauramat.jar. I think the author forgot to delete these jar files before distributing the package. Nonetheless, the jar file can be correctly created using the ant jar command.
For the QA tools testing, I was a little surprised that the verify test did not pass. Therefore, I went to run the test tool one by one, and here are the results:
JUnit: Successful, but there are a lot of logging info printed out, and it made the output in the command prompt a little bit messy.
Checkstyle: Successful.
PMD: 1 rule violation "assertTrue(true) or similar statements are unnecessary". This comes from the main method testing. As the Prof. Johnson said, the main method is evil, and I think the author did this in order to complete the 100% coverage in Emma.
FindBugs: Successful.
Emma: Successful with 100% coverage to all classes, methods, blocks and lines.
For the program execution, I invoked the command "java –jar webspider-lauramat.jar –totallinks http://www.hackystat.org 100", and the result was 1553 links. Regardless this result is correct or not, the program seemed to be functioning correctly. However, I found one thing that is a little inconsistent: the arguments are passed and checked as an array, but the order of the arguments does not affect the program because they are checked in a way such that as long as they are valid, they will be passed. This is not consistent with the normal way of invoking this program, which I tend to consider it as a bad thing.
2. Code Format and Convention Review
The source codes are very nicely written and documented. I did not find any apparent violation in terms of coding convention. Also, the methods are highly modulized, thus it was actually quite easy to understand the code.
3. Test Case Review
All testing methods do not contain the annotation of "@Test". I am not sure whether the annotation is needed when the test class extends the TestCase class, since there will be error when I tried to add back the @Test annotation.
Black box perspective: All the public methods are tested directly or indirectly. The two major tasks are tested through the website http://www2.hawaii.edu/~lauramat/myfavorites/. For the total links task and the most popular page task, the test cases are correct by comparing to the expect results. The test cases also included the boundaries input, such as an invalid URL, an invalid page, and a page with no link. However, the program did not include test cases like invalid number of pages (negative number, very large number) to crawl through, or a page with link points to itself.
White box perspective: The author did a very good job on this one. The Emma summary is as below:
class: 100% (2/2)
method: 100% (26/26)
block: 100% (648/648)
line: 100% (136/136)
Every single line of code has been tested, although this does not guarantee high quality codes, it is still an outstanding sign for the completeness of the testing.
Break the buggah: I used Prof. Johnson's myspace website to run through the total links task, the program seemed to be crushed because of the JavaScript content, even though it still returned a result of 0 links found in the first 100 pages. On the other hand, I tried to omit the number of pages argument, and the program went to find the total number of links on the first page, instead of reporting the missing of the argument.
4. Summary and Lessons Learned
From review Laura's code, I learned that a nicely written code is very self-explaining. I actually enjoyed reading her code while doing this review. I am pretty sure that my reviewer is going to have a hard time to read through my code since they are quite messy and poorly commented. Also, I learned that when we distribute a package, we should always check the content of package to make sure there is no missing files or extra files.
On the other hand, I notice that testing can be very tricky. When I wrote my test cases, not all the exceptions cases are included, and I did not have the black box and white box perspective in mind. From now on I should pay more attention in writing test cases using the different perspectives because they can complement each other.
1. Installation Review
I downloaded the zip file from Laura's blog, and the installation process went very smoothly with only a few modifications, such as renaming the files and folders. I noticed that the zip file comes with 3 text files: a.txt, b.txt, c.txt. They seem to be some logging output files, but I think they are only for intermediate testing purpose. Also, there are 2 jar files already included in the package: webspider.jar and webspider-lauramat.jar. I think the author forgot to delete these jar files before distributing the package. Nonetheless, the jar file can be correctly created using the ant jar command.
For the QA tools testing, I was a little surprised that the verify test did not pass. Therefore, I went to run the test tool one by one, and here are the results:
JUnit: Successful, but there are a lot of logging info printed out, and it made the output in the command prompt a little bit messy.
Checkstyle: Successful.
PMD: 1 rule violation "assertTrue(true) or similar statements are unnecessary". This comes from the main method testing. As the Prof. Johnson said, the main method is evil, and I think the author did this in order to complete the 100% coverage in Emma.
FindBugs: Successful.
Emma: Successful with 100% coverage to all classes, methods, blocks and lines.
For the program execution, I invoked the command "java –jar webspider-lauramat.jar –totallinks http://www.hackystat.org 100", and the result was 1553 links. Regardless this result is correct or not, the program seemed to be functioning correctly. However, I found one thing that is a little inconsistent: the arguments are passed and checked as an array, but the order of the arguments does not affect the program because they are checked in a way such that as long as they are valid, they will be passed. This is not consistent with the normal way of invoking this program, which I tend to consider it as a bad thing.
2. Code Format and Convention Review
The source codes are very nicely written and documented. I did not find any apparent violation in terms of coding convention. Also, the methods are highly modulized, thus it was actually quite easy to understand the code.
3. Test Case Review
All testing methods do not contain the annotation of "@Test". I am not sure whether the annotation is needed when the test class extends the TestCase class, since there will be error when I tried to add back the @Test annotation.
Black box perspective: All the public methods are tested directly or indirectly. The two major tasks are tested through the website http://www2.hawaii.edu/~lauramat/myfavorites/. For the total links task and the most popular page task, the test cases are correct by comparing to the expect results. The test cases also included the boundaries input, such as an invalid URL, an invalid page, and a page with no link. However, the program did not include test cases like invalid number of pages (negative number, very large number) to crawl through, or a page with link points to itself.
White box perspective: The author did a very good job on this one. The Emma summary is as below:
class: 100% (2/2)
method: 100% (26/26)
block: 100% (648/648)
line: 100% (136/136)
Every single line of code has been tested, although this does not guarantee high quality codes, it is still an outstanding sign for the completeness of the testing.
Break the buggah: I used Prof. Johnson's myspace website to run through the total links task, the program seemed to be crushed because of the JavaScript content, even though it still returned a result of 0 links found in the first 100 pages. On the other hand, I tried to omit the number of pages argument, and the program went to find the total number of links on the first page, instead of reporting the missing of the argument.
4. Summary and Lessons Learned
From review Laura's code, I learned that a nicely written code is very self-explaining. I actually enjoyed reading her code while doing this review. I am pretty sure that my reviewer is going to have a hard time to read through my code since they are quite messy and poorly commented. Also, I learned that when we distribute a package, we should always check the content of package to make sure there is no missing files or extra files.
On the other hand, I notice that testing can be very tricky. When I wrote my test cases, not all the exceptions cases are included, and I did not have the black box and white box perspective in mind. From now on I should pay more attention in writing test cases using the different perspectives because they can complement each other.
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