编程基础：Incremental Development

Incremental development

Any program of non-trivial size will be developed faster, with fewer bugs, using the technique of incremental development, which means developing, and testing, pieces of the program incrementally. The incremental aspect is that your program may gradually grow until it includes the complete functionality. (Other people use different names for the same thing. Sometimes it’s called building subsets.)

A desirable feature of individual classes is that they are as independent as possible from a program that uses them. Some classes, such as String, or ArrayList (which we will see soon) are general-purpose and can be used in many different programs. Other classes are more special-purpose, such as CoinTossSimulator, but still are modules that can be separated from a particular program that uses them. We can test such a module using a unit-test, which is a program specially designed to test the module.

We often unit-test one (or more) classes, and then once we are convinced that unit is working correctly, we can integrate that class with other code that uses it. If this larger code base is now buggy, we can feel fairly certain that the bug is in the new code we added, since we already tested the first class. So any time we find bugs, it’s in a small program: much easier than locating bugs in large programs.

Similarly, if we make later changes or enhancements to our non-tester client program our code will be more robust in the face of these changes because, in our unit-test, we tested the module in ways not specific to how it was used in the earlier version of the program. (As you have experienced as a user, software is always getting changed over time, e.g., the latest version of Windows is in the double-digits.) For example, in this assignment, there are methods and method functionality of CoinTossSimulator that are not used by the program that draws the bar graph, but you would never be sure whether they worked if you didn’t test them.

For this assignment, the final product will not be a very large program, but we want to get you in the practice of using incremental development, so you will still be successful when you are trying to develop and debug much larger programs. Even in this program there are at least two distinct issues to deal with: (1) figuring out how to use the random-number generator to do a coin-toss simulation and (2) figuring out how to do the graphics to draw the results of the simulation. It will be much easier if we can deal with these issues one at a time, so we can isolate bugs related to each one more easily. For this assignment you are required to write a console-based Tester class to test our CoinTossSimulator class. This test program is described in more detail in the next section.

Similarly, you could test your Bar class apart from its use in this particular bar graph by creating several bars with hard-coded data or data from the keyboard using a Scanner. We won’t require you to submit such a BarTester program for this assignment, however.