Robert Niggebrugge CofC CSCI 362 Fall 2020 Blog

HW17: Team Progress I

Software Engineering is a tough but rewarding profession and this class so far reflects this. Our interaction with the material and the semester long project has been quite frankly exhausting. However, I have learned and accomplished far more than I expected I would. The opportunity to build this automated unit test framework is a very unique experience that have enjoyed. Even with the initial difficulties of having to switch projects and teaching my teammates Javascript, we have made great progress. A large part of the process so far has fallen on my shoulders. Because of my familiarity with Mars Map Maker, the software we are testing, and Javascript I have been in charge of implementing our framework. The toughest barrier we encountered up to this point was the issue relating to how to actually implement a unit test from a command line interface in Javascript because it is an interpreted language. Pulling an instance's method in Javascript is a slightly tricky thing to do. It is even more tricky to do it from scratch in a Javascript framework like ReactJS, which Mars Map Maker is built out of. This is where testing tools like Jest came in handy for our project. While Jest can do much more than just mimic an instance of a React Component, this key feature is all we needed to enable us to create our testing framework. At this point we came up with the design of our framework, and I got to implementing it. Now that the framework is up and running we are focusing on properly designing more test cases that give us meaningful information about how these functions work and if they can be broken.