In this second assignment for the software quality Assur & test we had to practice writing more Junit5 test cases. We had given three java classes, product, customer, and order. Our job was to write Junit5 test classes. Different from the week before this time we had more test cases to write. I liked and disliked this assignment because I enjoyed writing the test cases but the part that was not my favorite was running gradle in the project. It gave me a lot of trouble until I figure out what was wrong with it.

I believe that like me, many students or developers like to write Junit5 test cases. In our assignments we just scratch the surface of the features offered by JUnit 5. To find out more, go to the JUnit 5 documentation, it covers a huge host of topics, including the features we’ve have used until now and many more in detail. What I personally like about writing in Junit is that it follows a modular approach, which makes extending the API easier. It provides a separation of concern, where writing tests and discovering/running them is served from different APIs. In essence, three main modules exist within JUnit 5: JUnit Platform + JUnit Jupiter + JUnit Vintage.

Another obstacle that I had for this assignment was running gradle in program. Gradle is an open-source build automation tool that is designed to be flexible enough to build almost any type of software. What I like about it is that gradle avoids unnecessary work by only running the tasks that need to run because their inputs or outputs have changed. When I run gradle in my computer some of the test cases failed even though they passed in my environment. The main problem was in one test case. My solution to this problem is think another way you can write your test case, and that’s what I did. I changed the test cases and added some import statement that were missing and no issue after that.

Overall, I enjoyed this assignment. I like writing Junit5, but I don’t enjoy gradle. I had used it before and always causing trouble for me. Hope in the future that things will run smoothly.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Tech, Guaranteed by mshkurti and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

For this week I want to talk about the Dig Deeper apprenticeship pattern. This is a pattern that everyone in computer science understand it well and doesn’t need to many words. The main point of this pattern is that no matter what tool you decide to explore, learn to dig deep into it. Acquire the depths of knowledge to the point that you know why things are the way they are.

In today’s world there are so many tools that is so hard to keep track with. I’m sure anyone can learn a tool or language if they have enough time to explore and understand it. If that’s not the case then you only ever learn the parts of a technology that you need to get your portion of the system working, and you depend on other members of the team to learn the other parts. So, with what you end up is a superficial knowledge of a thousand tools and you’re not even aware of how little you know until something or someone puts you to the test.

Another thing that I like, and I don’t like at the same time is depend on other members of the team to learn other parts. There are serious students or coworkers who will do their job but also, we have the other side of coin. There are people who don’t take it seriously, so you end up doing all the work by yourself or have misunderstanding. Solution to this is to hope you have time to learn and explore more of the tool and finger crossed to have someone driven to learn new things working with you.

Another advantage of digging deep into a technology is that you can actually explain what’s going on beneath the surface of the systems you work on. The book explains how in interviews, this understanding will distinguish you from other candidates who can’t describe the software they’ve helped build in a meaningful way because all they understand is one little portion. Once you’re part of a team, it’s the application of this pattern that separates out those who are making random piles of rubble. So, you don’t have to fake it till you make it. If you invest your free time to learn something new you going to add more points to yourself.

References:
Apprenticeship Patterns by Dave Hoover; Adewale Oshineye

From the blog CS@Worcester – Tech, Guaranteed by mshkurti and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

For this week I choose to talk about the concrete skills pattern. I want to start it with a question that made an impression in me when I was reading it. The concrete skills you possess are your answer to the question: “If we hire you today, what can you do on Monday morning that will benefit us?” The point is that you will often require hiring managers to take a leap of faith in choosing you. Concrete skills (which are ideally discrete enough that you can bring toy implementations to an interview) allow you to meet them halfway.

Having knowledge is not the same as having the skill and practical ability to apply that knowledge. I believe that because I feel the pressure of it in the software class that I’m right now. Me and my classmates are working in a project that require from us to learn some new tools that we need to use. In the first month of it most of time I have read a lot about these tools and how they work but I cannot compare it with the knowledge that I will learn when I start to apply it. I always tell myself that practicing makes you perfect. That’s how you earn a concrete skill.

If you are not sure what concrete skills, you need in the book there is a suggestion for it. Collect the CVs of people whose skills you respect. You can either ask them for a copy or download the CVs from their websites. For each person, identify five discrete skills noted on the CV, and determine which of these skills would be immediately useful on the kind of team you want to join. Put together a plan and a toy project that will demonstrate that you have acquired these skills. Implement the plan. It is a good advice.

The last thing that I want to add is that is important to not get lost in the sea of knowledge. I speak from my experience. I have done that and is not the way to learn a skill.  Focus on one thing at the time. It is easy to want to know everything, but you would end up not learning anything.

References: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/apprenticeship-patterns/9780596806842/ch01.html, Concrete Skills

From the blog CS@Worcester – Tech, Guaranteed by mshkurti and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

This time the pattern that I would like to write about is Be the Worst. I always thought about which is better, to be the worst on the best team or the best on the worst team? This pattern explains that is better to find a stronger team where you are the weakest member and have room to grow. When you are in a strongest team you learn from them and makes you feel perform better. The other members of that team will often prevent you from making mistakes, and help you recover from mistakes so smoothly that you won’t realize that you may not be learning as much as you think. 

I have been part of both cases. I have practice being the best in a group and vice versa and I would choose to be the worst any day. Personally, I’d rather be the weakest player in a strong team. That makes me look like a better player, and it helps me develop the skills to become a better player. When I worked in a project with some of my teammates that had more knowledge and experience than me, I was able to improve myself and learn some tips than books or videos would show me or learn you.

When you are in a group like this it is easy to forget, and you start compare yourself with the best and sometimes you feel stupid or not doing enough. I felt that in more than one occasion, but this pattern has reminded me another thing that I have forgotten. Your goal is to measure your abilities and find ways to be better than you were yesterday. We’re all on the same journey and comparing ourselves to others is useful only when it allows us to find ways to help each other improve.

I believe every pattern has its own good and bad sides. You can’t stay for a long time being the worst in a team because the phase where you learn ends and team moves on and so do you.  Being the worst on a team of outstanding developers can’t be compensated for with environment, equipment, or money. You can’t compensate for learning next to people who have already traveled the path and know how to avoid the holes on the road ahead. Pairing with great software developers is invaluable.

Source:
Apprenticeship Patterns by Adewale Oshineye; Dave Hoover, Be the Worst

From the blog CS@Worcester – Tech, Guaranteed by mshkurti and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Breakable Toys is a very interesting pattern. It talks about doing and undoing something. You must learn how to break it in order to unbreak it again and really learn its inner parts and how does it work. As the author clearly states, “failure is merely an incentive to try a different approach next time.” Breakable Toys is more about deliberately creating opportunities to learn by stepping beyond your boundaries and single-handedly building complete software projects.

I´ve applied that pattern repeatedly, sometimes breaking it too much that I would take hours to unbreak it, but at the end, taking with me a greater knowledge. This way I learned computer languages. I have a project with requirements, and I must translate it into code. Nothing works with the first try so you have to break your classes over and over again until you get it right. At the end what you gain is experience in that language and knowledge that you can share and use it in the future.

This pattern made me understand that is ok to break and fail. In the apprenticeship pattern book, in the chapter about the breakable toys, the author writes that Only by attempting to do bold things, failing, learning from that failure, and trying again do we grow into the kind of people who can succeed when faced with difficult problems. I am one of those persons who is afraid to break it because it might damage the whole thing even though it might need that.

Breakable toys is one of those patterns that need to be in your mind all the time. You need to remind yourself that the road to learn something new is not easy and has a lot of failures, but what is important is that you do it with passion. It really doesn’t matter what you decide to do, as long as you experiment and learn.

You can’t do anything well unless you love it, and if you love to hack, you’ll inevitably be working on projects of your own.

—Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters

From the blog CS@Worcester – Tech, Guaranteed by mshkurti and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

This week we had our first assignment. This assignment was about practicing writing JUnit 5 test cases. I am familiar with Junit 5 test cases from another computer class in last semester. Because I haven’t used Junit or coding in java for a while it took me a while to remember what I knew and how to code the test cases. JUnit 5 is most widely used testing framework for java applications. For very long time, JUnit has been doing its job perfectly. In between, JDK 8 brought very exciting features in java and most notably lambda expressions. JUnit 5 aims to adapt java 8 style of coding and several other features as well, that’s why java 8 is required to create and execute tests in JUnit 5.

In this homework, we had a BankAccount class and create at least one test class for the Bank Account System using Junit 5. In the base assignment we had to write the test for the methods that were in the BankAccount class and at the same time create a private method. In the intermediate we had to the write tests for which may include Custom Exceptions. In JUnit 5, to test methods which throws exceptions, we should use .assertThrows() method from org.junit.jupiter.api.Assertions class. The assertThrows() method asserts that execution of the supplied executable block or lambda expression which throws an exception of the expectedType.

In the advance I had to watch a podcast from Sam Brannen, Deep Dive into Junit5. The podcast was very interesting. From here I learned the fun fact that Junit5 is called Jupiter, the reason is Jupiter happens to be the fifth planet from the Sun. He explained some advantages and differences that Junit 5 has over 4 like; JUnit 5 has new features for describing, organizing, and executing tests, especially the display names and can be organized hierarchically, Junit 5 can use more than one extension at a time, you can easily combine the spring extensions with other extensions etc.

Overall, I really enjoyed working in this assignment even though I had to refresh my skills in java and writing test cases has always been a challenge for me but that doesn’t mean that I will give up.

https://howtodoinjava.com/junit5/junit-5-vs-junit-4/

From the blog CS@Worcester – Tech, Guaranteed by mshkurti and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

I want to start this blog with something very interesting that I read in the book; Surround yourself with developers who are better than you. Find a stronger team where you are the weakest member and have room to grow. Being in a strong team can make you feel as if you are performing better. The other members of that team will often prevent you from making mistakes, and help you recover from mistakes so smoothly that you will not realize that you may not be learning as much as you think. It is interesting and true but also, we have to be careful because there are risks. You can end up feeling bad about yourself and your skills or there is more than you can handle so is good and bad being in strong group.

This semester I’m learning something new in software development capstone. This means that I have to read new information and trying to understand it. Expanding your ability to take in new information is a critical, though sometimes overwhelming, step for apprentices. This book help explains that you must develop the discipline and techniques necessary to efficiently absorb new information, as well as to understand it, retain it, and apply it. I feel this chapter is so relevant to me because sometimes I feel lost with all that reading and new information. While Expanding Your Bandwidth can be fun and is an interesting skill in and of itself, for the apprentice it is a means to an end.

I always try to hide my ignorance when I don’t know something about a topic. This book helped me understand that it fine to not know or understand it. It helped me to work with my problems and allow yourself to Expose Your Ignorance in a specific technology in order to focus your attention on what you need to learn next. Then Confront Your Ignorance and let your team and your customers watch you flex your knowledge-acquisition muscles. When all this new information and mind-stretching becomes overwhelming, it’s important to Retreat into Competence, remember how far you’ve come and the skills you’ve developed, and gather yourself to ascend to the next plateau.

Source: Apprenticeship Patterns: Guidance for the Aspiring Software Craftsman by Dave Hoover and Adewale Oshineye, Chapter 1 and Chapter 2- 6 Introduction.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Tech, Guaranteed by mshkurti and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

In the Software Constr. class, I was presented for the first time with the angularjs front-end web framework. AngularJS is a structural framework for dynamic web apps. It lets you use HTML as your template language and lets you extend HTML’s syntax to express your application’s components clearly and succinctly. AngularJS’s data binding and dependency injection eliminate much of the code you would otherwise have to write. And it all happens within the browser, making it an ideal partner with any server technology.

I had the chance to work a little with this framework and I understand some part of it how it works. Angular has the following key features which makes it one of the powerful frameworks in the market.

 MVC – The framework is built on the famous concept of MVC (Model-View-Controller). This pattern is based on splitting the business logic layer, the data layer, and presentation layer into separate sections. The division into different sections is done so that each one could be managed more easily.

Data Model Binding – You do not need to write special code to bind data to the HTML controls. This can be done by Angular by just adding a few snippets of code.

Writing less code – When carrying out DOM manipulation a lot of JavaScript was required to be written to design any application. But with Angular, you will be amazed with the lesser amount of code you need to write for DOM manipulation.

Unit Testing ready – The designers at Google not only developed Angular but also developed a testing framework called “Karma” which helps in designing unit tests for AngularJS applications.

There are some advantages for this framework.

Since it is an open-source framework, you can expect the number of errors or issues to be minimal.

Two-way binding – Angular.js keeps the data and presentation layer in sync. You do not need to write additional JavaScript code to keep the data in your HTML code and your data later in sync. Angular.js will automatically do this for you.

Angular can take care of routing which means moving from one view to another. This is the key fundamental of single page applications; wherein you can move to different functionalities in your web application based on user interaction but still stay on the same page.

It extends HTML by providing its own elements called directives.  So why Angular? While AngularJS does not suit every project idea, it builds amazing apps. The most valuable reasons of AngularJS usefulness lie in their concepts and benefits that they provide. Nowadays with all marketing strategies and technologies to find a worth product has become a real challenge. Besides, it is easy to lose yourselves among all those benefits that are listed by every product. And it is even harder to find those ones you really need and that really suits your idea.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Tech, Guaranteed by mshkurti and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.