CST 438 - Week 8

This was our last week in CST 438 - Software Engineering.

Reflection

For this journal we were asked to list the five most important things we learned from this class.

  • Unit Tests: As I have mentioned before, we have had to write unit tests before in a previous class. However, this class didn't explain why adding unit tests is important, so at the time it simply felt like another assignment. Learning why unit tests are important, to help to catch bugs or breaks in code, has changed how I look at assignments for tests and has motivated me to start adding tests in my personal projects.
  • AGILE: With it being widely used in the industry I had heard of AGILE before, but I didn't know much about it. Learning about AGILE has helped me understand better how the industry operates, and it has helped prepare me for it.
  • Waterfall: Similar to AGILE, I knew that teams may choose to document a project or piece of software before starting to work on it. The main example I was familiar with were design documents for video games. However, I wasn't familiar with how this process would be with industry as a whole. Similar to AGILE, learning about the process makes me feel more prepared for the industry.
  • System Tests + Large Testing: Although I was familiar with unit tests, I was not familiar with system tests (medium tests according to SAG) or large tests. The basic concept is the same, make sure the code works, but the scale and specific purpose of these tests are different than of unit tests. Although I haven't written a large, multi-machine test, we did write system tests, and I feel more comfortable with these types of tests.
  • React: React offers a different alternative for frontend development that I found to be very interesting. Its focus on reusing components in particular was interesting. Learning React gives me another option for frontend development.

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