After last week's technical review, Jeff and I swapped projects with the grads group. That is, we took over on the grads' code, and they started working on ours. Both groups added three more commands to the existing codebase that they had just inherited.
This was an interesting experience taking over on an existing software project. Of course, there was some initial overhead getting familiar with the layout of the new project's code. This wasn't too onerous, though, since the overall structure was fairly logical.
Once Jeff and I started working, the work went smoothly. We had already completed one project together. I think Jeff and I communicated well, and each of us made some significant contributions. We agreed on all of the major design issues.
Still, for all of the harmony, I'd say that my most interesting learning experience this week was the old "pick your battles" experience. If you've ever shared a living space with someone as an adult--whether a college roommate or a romantic partner--you probably know what I mean. There's a period of adjustment to the person's habits and quirks. For example, maybe your new roommate already put the silverware in the left drawer when you feel that it is obviously more natural to have it in the right drawer. Or maybe your new lover seems to somehow constantly drop loose change; eventually stray coins lie scattered throughout the house.
For each new quirk you discover, you have to decide whether it bothers you or not. If it does, then you need to figure out if you're willing to just overlook it, constantly clean up after them, or make an issue of it. If you make an issue of every little thing, you can easily become an unpleasant nag. Depending on how it's done, cleaning up behind someone can come across as a passive-aggressive show of disapproval. But, if something really does bother you and you don't speak up, you can find that your living space is not really your own. That's what I mean by picking your battles.
First, Jeff and I had to come to terms with the existing code. As we settled in, we found we had to "move the silverware" in a few places to meet our tastes. In particular, we overhauled the look and behavior of the user interface. We left the reflection-based loading of classes in place, though.
Then there were the minor differences in working style that I noticed between me and Jeff. For the most part, these were so minor as to border on petty: "If I'd done it, I wouldn't have spaced the output that way" or "I usually write one class at a time rather than mock up all the classes and then fill in the details later."
A couple weeks ago, I mentioned the motivating aspect of working in a group. My point this week is that, whenever you work with someone else, they are not going to do things exactly the same way you do. That is to be expected. But, even when you realize this consciously, each specific difference you discover can still cause a short pause: "Oh.. that's not how I would have done that... but that doesn't mean it's wrong... Am I going to accept how this has been done and move on, or do I want to say something and change it?" Overall, I discovered that I could just let these things go. It was just a new experience for me to adjust to someone else's presence in my coding project space, both in terms of the old code and the new.
Jeff and I got everything finished up before the deadline. I think our code is pretty solid, though some of our line-spacing might be a little off between different commands.
Testing code that connects to a server continued to be a pain. I considered making some sort of mock client object, but there proved to be too many methods that would need to be overridden to make it worthwhile.
I also found that, when verifying someone else's code, it's easier to run through a manual test rather than plod through all their JUnits and make sure it covers all the necessary cases. While I think it's good to get some manual testing in there occassionally--especially since that lets you spot things like typos and weird formatting that a JUnit test is not going to catch--I think this is still not quite ideal. Manual testing can find bugs that the person's JUnits missed. But, if the code is correct, manual testing won't reveal that an appropriate JUnit test is missing altogether. This means that changes to the code could cause an undetected failure later. So I guess I should work on using the person's JUnit tests as a loose guide to manual testing in order to spot missing/poor tests as well as any existing defects.
I'm still a fan of Issue-based Project Management. I'm also glad we kept our habit of having the other person mark completed tasks as Verified. It's an extra step, but it's a good feeling knowing that everything has been double-checked by someone else.
This is the last project for my software engineering course, so it may mean a blog hiatus for a while. But I should be back occasionally with news on other new software projects!
No comments:
Post a Comment