Notes on Assignment 4: Code Reuse

For this assignment, I mostly looked at your evaluations. Here are some general issues I noted in your evaluations.

• They were much too abbreviated. "Yes it worked" doesn't show me that you actually tested it. "It included four separate applications that let me try all four games. I tried each with XXX inputs and got a reasonable output." Would be much better.

• You need to give more specifics. "The methods appear randomly distributed" may be accurate, but it doesn't help the person you are evaluating improve his or her code. "The serve() method more appropriately belongs in the Player class rather than in the Ball class because it is players who serve" would be much better.

• Given that I gave you a series of questions to answer, it would have helped many of you if you'd organized your answers around those questions. Those who didn't often failed to answer some part sufficiently well.

• There is more to readability than "proper indentation". One should also concern themselves with variable names, choice of structures, commenting, use of constants rather than hard-coded numbers, and so on.

• One goal of the "Is it object-oriented?" question was to make you think about what it means to be object-oriented. Some of you just said, in effect, "It has objects, so it must be object-oriented."

Some notes that many of you may want to consider when writing your own programs ...

• I saw a number of complaints that while individual pieces were clear, the big picture (i.e., how they fit together) wasn't.

• I saw a number of complaints that it was difficult to tell how to run the application, given the large number of classes.

• Some of you included a number of extraneous methods. I would recommend making it clear that these methods shouldn't be used.

• Some of you failed to describe the return values from your methods.

Make sure that you give your comments to the person you evaluated.