| UMBC CMSC 202 | CSEE | 202 | current 202 |
You will never receive explicit instructions in a project specification about how to design the program. For example, you will never be told there should be some minimum number of constants or some specific number of functions or classes, since individual programmers will naturally come up with different designs for the same project. However, there are design techniques that every good programmer uses. You learned many of these technqiues in CMSC 201. They include
An often overlooked aspect of program development in courses such as this is testing. To help you appreciate the test process and to get you thinking about your design and implementation before actually writing any code, your project design assignment will also include a description of test cases you have considered when designing your project. Each project description will specify the minimum number of test cases for that project.
Your design/test assignment will always be due before your program. Your program will be checked to be sure that it follows the design that you submitted. It may differ from the design in only minor ways. For example, you may have decided to break a function into two functions once you began developing your code, or you may have added a parameter to a function's interface.
Design and testing are two of the most important aspects of programming.