Review of Wattdepot-CLI Branches: Eha and Elima

Following the same cycle as we did for Robocode, after our first deployment of each branch of Wattdepot-CLI, it came time to for the review. Our assignment this week for my Software Engineering class was to review two other branches of Wattdepot-CLI. My two assigned branches were Eha and Elima.

Eha's distribution version 1.0 can be downloaded here.
Elima's distribution version 1.0 can be downloaded here.

For this assignment, Prof. Johnson gave us a checklist that we followed to review each branch. The basic run down of the review was to make sure it builds successfully passing automated quality assurance tools (PMD, Checkstyle, Findbugs, JUnit), check the functionality, source code, and overall design of the system.

Instead of posting my two reviews directly in the post, I've uploaded PDF versions which can be downloaded at the following:

• Eha's Review
• Elima's Review

I'll also summarize my thoughts on each of the branches:

Branch Eha
Eha was the first branch I reviewed. I was able to build and run all the commands. Only the "list sources" didn't work. The one thing that I disliked was the lack/random placement of error messages. Generally, if there was something wrong the the command entered, i.e. missing params, or a keyword (genereated|consumed) was misspelled, the the system would seemingly dismiss the input and bring up a blank prompt. It was good that the system could tell there was something wrong, but what would be better is if the system could respond with "what" was wrong with the entered command. Other than that they need to just split the rest of the code into their respective classes and divide them into processor and command packages and create more in-depth test cases.

Branch Elima
This branch was sort of the opposite of Eha. Although they had the correct design structure, which I failed to do in my branch, (i.e. separate classes, separate packages) not all the commands worked. I had to look at the source code before I was supposed to in the checklist. What I discovered was that although they had separate classes for each command and each contained source code and weren't emtpy, not all the commands were mapped onto the HashMap. This made it slightly irritating/cumbersome to test if the system implemented the command. I tried looking at the blogs of both developers on the branch to gain insight as to which commands weren't implemented, but neither of them mentioned that they didn't map the commands onto the HashMap. I spent a good 30 minutes trying to figure out which commands the system did accept. Overall, a well organized system that needs to be filled in with complete commands and develop test cases.