CS Online Learning Journal

 This was our fifth week in CST438 - Software Engineering Reflection Last week we set up the backend for our group project, in the form of a RESTful API. This week we are setting up the front end of our project using React. My part was the instructor's assignment page, which allows instructors to view assignments for a section, and create, edit, or delete assignments. Overall, this week's assignment went much more smoothly than last week's assignment. This is largely because we didn't have to write any tests this week, we'll be doing that next week. The overall length of code for this assignment was also much shorter than last week's assignment, so that also helped. This week we read about larger tests. I wrote down some of the main ideas below. As I believe I've mentioned before, my experience with tests is limited to unit tests and the integrated tests from a previous lab in this course. So it was interesting to read about larger tests, why they are done, ...

 This was our fourth week in CST 438 - Software Engineering. Reflection Last week we set up a GitHub organization, along with some repositories and a project, for our multi-week group project for this course. We also planned who would do each task for the first two weeks, and our gave our estimates for how large and time consuming each task would be. This week we started working on the first set of tasks, which all focus on the API for the backend of the service. In the lecture material for the prooject it was mentioned that writing unit tests would take up more time than the code itself. This ended up being true, as most of my time was spent writing tests.   As part of this reflection, we were given the prompt "What is the most interesting thing you have learned in your reading of Software Engineering at Google ?" For me I think the most interesting thing would be its coverage on tests, which I talked about in last week's post . The second most interesting thing that SAG...

This was our third week in CST 438 - Software Engineering. Reflection This week we covered software testing (such as unit tests). I have had some limited experience with unit tests in previous classes, but not integration or E2E tests. Those classes also did not explain the importance of testing. It seemed like an extra, arduous step that I sometimes had to take with some coding projects. The reading for this week, both of which I summarized some of the main ideas below, did a good job at explaining why software developers write tests and how to write good tests. During the reading, I found myself thinking about how I could add tests to my personal projects to help improve them. This week we are setting up a group project on GitHub that will last for mutliple weeks. Currently the project is only going to consist of three empty repositories, but already I am thinking about how I will write tests for whatever my portions of the project end up being.   This week we also covered the ba...