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Week 7 [Fri, Sep 17th] - Project

iP:

  1. Add Increment: A-MoreOOP
  2. Add Increments as PRs: Level-8, Level-9, A-JavaDoc
  3. Set up a product website
  4. Submit the final version Fri, Oct 1st 2359

tP:

  1. Set up the project repo during the tutorial
  2. Plan the next iteration

iP

1 Add Increment: A-MoreOOP

Why more OOP?

One of the increments below asks you to push the design more towards the OOP approach. This is a good point to remind you that OOP is not a silver bullet or always the right choice. While it is the most widely used and possibly the right choice for a variety of situations, it may not work well for other situations, and it has plenty of detractors and known problems.

OOP has been chosen as the primary paradigm for this module and you are expected to try to push it to its limits. That should give you a first-hand experience of OOP's strengths and weaknesses. Furthermore, OOP (or any other paradigm) will appear worse than it really is if not used correctly, and learning to use it correctly in increasingly larger systems is another objective you can aim for in this module.

We do not prohibit the use of other paradigms, however. For example, if you find a place where the functional approach is better, go ahead and use it. As you know, Java supports functional programming to a certain extent.

Good OOP != OOP is good: While the module pushes you to use good OOP, do not interpret it as a message of OOP is good; it's good for some cases and not so for other cases. The best is usually a combination of approaches. Hence, you are encouraged to get better at other paradigms, the functional paradigm in particular which has been rising in popularity in some areas such as big data, AI, parallel systems.
That said, it is also preferable to use one paradigm as the primary approach and fallback on others only when the primary paradigm is clearly sub-optimal. Reason: mixing everything in equal measures might make the system even harder to understand.

  • As in the previous week, commit, tag, and push, as you do the following increments in the master branch (no need to use separate branches).
Duke A-MoreOOP: Use More OOP

2 Add Increments as PRs: Level-8, Level-9, A-JavaDoc

  • Note how to merge PRs:

  • Practice using parallel git branches and PRs, as explained below:
  1. First, do each increment as a parallel branch (follow the branch naming convention you followed earlier branch-Level-8 etc.), but do not merge any.
  2. Then, push each branch to your fork, and create a PR within your fork (i.e., from the increment branch to the master branch). Be careful not to create a PR to the upstream repo. If you did create such a PR by mistake, no worries, just close it yourself.

  1. Now, merge one of the PRs and update the remaining PRs accordingly, as given below:
    1. Merge one of the PRs on GitHub e.g., Level-8. Remember to choose the Create merge commit option when merging.
    2. Pull the updated master branch from your fork to your Computer.
    3. Note how the remaining un-merged branches are no longer in sync with the latest master. To rectify, merge the master branch to each of them. Resolve merge conflicts, if any.
    4. Push the updated branches to your fork. The PRs will update automatically to reflect the updated branch.
    5. As before, tag the merge commit in the master branch and push the tag to your fork.
  2. Merge the remaining PRs using a procedure similar to the above.
Duke Level-8: Dates and Times optional

Duke Level-9: Find

Duke A-JavaDoc: JavaDoc

3 Set up a product website

  • Add a brief User Guide (UG)
Duke A-UserGuide: User Guide

4 Submit the final version Fri, Oct 1st 2359

  • Soft deadline: midnight before the tutorial

  • Create a new jar file

    • Create the JAR file in one of these ways:
      • If you have added a GUI or using third-party libraries: use Gradle.
      • Else: you can use Intellij.
    • The JAR file should be cross-platform and should work in a computer that has Java 11.
  • Do the following smoke tests to ensure the jar file works (reason: a similar flow will be used when grading your iP).

    1. Copy the jar file to an empty folder and test it from there. This should surface issues with hard-coded file paths.
    2. Pass the jar file to team members and ask them to do a test drive. Assuming some of your team members' OS differ from yours, this should verify if the app is cross-platform.
  • Create a new release on GitHub (e.g., v0.2) and upload the JAR file.

    • Recommended to refrain from uploading multiple JAR files as this can cause extra work for the evaluators.
Duke A-Release: Release

tP: Get ready for iterations

1 Set up the project repo during the tutorial

  • Set up the team org, the team repo, and individual forks as explained below:

2 Plan the next iteration

  • Plan the next iteration. As you know, you should follow the breadth-first iterative process. Therefore, first you must decide what functionalities should be in the product if you had only two weeks to implement it. You have done that already when you chose user stories for v1.0, translated that to features, and even drafted the UG based on those features. You can tweak that plan further at this point if you wish, given that you now have some idea of how fast the team can work when using the prescribed workflow.
    • Aim to produce a working MVP at the end of this iteration even if the functionalities are not polished (polishing can be done in a later iteration).
    • If possible, break the iteration into two increments i.e., aim to produce an even simpler but working version after one week.
    • Avoid depth-first implementations: "I'll do the back-end part of feature X in this iteration" is not acceptable as that is not in the spirit of iterative development. Remember, we are pretending this to be the last iteration; why would you implement the back-end part of a feature in the last iteration?
      It is OK to add simpler versions of bigger features, but not OK to add partial features that can't be used yet.
  • Divide the work among the team members i.e., the work required for the current iteration.
  • Reflect the above plan in the issue tracker by assigning the corresponding issues (create new issues if necessary) to yourself and to the corresponding milestone. For example, the user story pertaining to the increment show a place holder for photo, showing a generic default image should be assigned to Jake and to milestone v1.0
    Optionally, you can define a mid-v1.0 milestone to keep track of things to be done within the first half of the milestone.