Weekly Journal : Testing

As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it was not as easy to get programs right as we had thought. We had to discover debugging. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs.  — Maurice Wilkes, 1949

Submitting Your Work

Submit a Markdown formatted plain text file, named week08_testing.md, to the journals folder of your individual portfolio_NETID repository provided for you in the course's Gitlab group.

Specification

Testing

As you program larger, more complex, projects it is vitally important, and some would say morally imperative, that you have confidence that the most basic aspects of your code works correctly based on automatically testing it (rather than manual, occasional, tests). Beyond that, testing is vitally important to producing real world software and, unless we begin to take software bugs seriously, our industry may need to become regulated. The good news is that like making readable, minimally well-designed code, is a matter of practicing to develop new habits.

• Describe your preferred ways to do testing.
• How has it been to incorporate automated testing into programming process? What has made it easy or hard to do?
• What are common causes of the bugs/errors you make in your code?
• How has testing changed or improved your debugging process?
• How has testing changed or improved your willingness to refactor code?
• How do you assess the quality of a test?
• How easy or hard is it for you to come up with "sad" path tests for your code?
• How could you improve your testing process?

After answering the questions above, watch Bob Martin's video on the need for professionalism in coding and then answer the following questions:

• Why is it important to be able to easily and repeatably test your code?
• What other kinds of errors can you think of beyond basic functionality bugs?
• What ideas do you have about testing beyond Unit testing (hand writing specific inputs for individual methods)?

Learning Reflection

Take time regularly to reflect on the development of your thoughts by describing what you have learned from specific, important, events or resources. These efforts at metacognition helps you deepen your learning by making you more aware of your own thinking and more active in your education. These can be about anything useful, interesting, unexpected, controversial, or a spectacular success or failure that occurred.

• Describe at least two of things you have learned from the course resources (such as readings, code examples or refactorings, etc.)
  This helps you remember the sources of and linkages between some of the non-coding, thought-work, that you do during the semester.
• Describe at least two thing you learned from interactions with any of the Teaching Team or class meetings so far this semester
  This helps you process the feedback received and helps us ensure it was well communicated.

ChatGPT

ChatGPT can help you generate ideas, create example code, review, refactor, or even debug code. While you are not required to use it, if you do, I think it would be helpful to share our collective experiences. To that end, each week's Journal will include a place for you to share how you used ChatGPT in more detail than would typically be found when attributing it within your code or README file. I have also created an ED thread tag for ChatGPT. This exercise can also help you reflect on how to use it more deliberately and usefully.

• Describe two situations in which you sought help from ChatGPT and whether or not its responses were ultimately helpful
• Describe one situation in which you refined ChatGPT's response and what information learned in this course helped you engineer your prompts or try these examples
• Give one direct prompt you provided ChatGPT