Project for ICS 111 (Title Pending)

This semester, I will be serving as the lab assistant for one of the ICS 111 courses at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. While this course is for Java, and while it is still programming that will help keep my limited skills in practice, it is not exactly pushing me to the limits of my abilities. Doing the assignments that the students themselves are doing does take some time, but it is mostly material that I already know well (in some cases, the assignments are identical to those that I did several years ago when I was taking ICS 111). In order to improve, I will have to continue doing new work that will challenge me.

Aside from Java, the various technologies that I have used over the past year have essentially not been touched since December. I have done some programming since then, but never anything that really required build tools or project management or anything of the sort. I have often asserted that these technologies are extremely beneficial for the software engineer (except for PMD and Checkstyle—I remain bitter on that matter), and I need to maintain my ability to use those tools.

At the same time, many of the students taking ICS 111 require help, both on theory and on programming. This is especially true due to the exams interspersed throughout the semester: while a skilled programmer can safely ignore a fair amount of theory on the programming assignments without any noticeable difficulties, such a course of action will undoubtedly prove detrimental on exams. (At least, that is what usually happens to me.) Something that could help on the material that the students need to study could be very useful, especially if presented in an entertaining, engaging manner.

I also have a vast array of old programming projects that I have been meaning to work on. In particular, the oldest (and thus first in the queue) is a Lisp project for school from Fall 2009 in which my group created an adventure game similar to the Colossal Cave Adventure game (http://www.rickadams.org/adventure/). The main character was a Computer Science student who had to take an exam and complete a programming assignment in Lisp. While we did get credit for the project, there were several issues that we failed to address due to time constraints. The protagonist lacked an inventory to hold objects in, and there was at least one area of the game that I wanted to add. Unfortunately, over the years my knowledge of Lisp has deteriorated to the point where working with Lisp is currently impractical.

In order to meet all of these needs, I intend to finish the aforementioned game. As it contains some information specific to the class that I was taking at the time, some adaptation will be necessary in addition to the expected difficulties in translating from Lisp to Java. For example, the programming assignment in the original game was to be written in Lisp; in this new version, the assignment will be in Java. Furthermore, the original Lisp program was a text-based game; the Java version should utilize the Swing components, both for usability and because the ICS 111 students will be learning about said components themselves. While I lack the skill necessary to create a full graphical environment with animated characters and visual environments and such, something as simple as placing text input and output into a JFrame is well within my abilities. The end result of this work will hopefully be a program that will both help the ICS 111 students in their studies as well as provide an example of coding style.

I intend to use many of the tools covered previously on this blog. Eclipse, as usual, will serve as my primary IDE, though I will use Notepad++ for non-Java files and possibly jGRASP since that is what the ICS 111 students are currently using. The project files will be stored on Google Project Hosting as well on my personal computer; while this project will not use anywhere near the full potential that Google offers, the ability to create and monitor Issues has and will work well with Issue Driven Project Management. In conjunction with Google Project Hosting, I will use TortoiseSVN again to commit changes to the project; I do not anticipate needing to update my local copy from the repository, but having that option may prove useful in time. I will also continue using Ant to perform various testing and create distribution files. Regarding testing, JUnit and Jacoco will be of use.

On the other hand, there are some tools that I will not have access to. The most notable of these is Jenkins; since this is a private project not associated with WattDepot, I imagine that the Jenkins server would not be available for use. Though I will use Checkstyle and PMD with some reluctance, I will have to learn to adjust both of them to fit my personal guidelines. The same is true for Eclipse, though as I have already taken care of the formatting in Eclipse this does not really count as much of a task.

While I will try to follow Issue Driven Project Management in working on this project, certain circumstances will make this much more difficult. Of course, since this is an individual project all of the issues will necessarily belong to me (I was born before multiple processors were common, so naturally I would only be able to support a single personality). As a consequence of this lack of partners, there is no need to have meetings every couple of days to discuss progress. Although my schedule is very light in theory—only twelve credits this semester and an average of twelve hours per week at work—the fact that I am serving as a lab assistant easily takes up six hours per week just counting my time in the lab, and unfortunately these hours are spread out across the week so that I am constantly busy. Issue Driven Project Management involves short tasks that should only take a few days at most to complete; however, as of present there is no guarantee that I will be able to work on the project save on the weekends. Nonetheless, I shall endeavor to follow the guidelines of Issue Driven Project Management to the greatest extent possible.

As this project is still in the planning stage, there are no links available yet; in particular, the site on Google Project Hosting has not yet been created. However, this should be rectified in the near future.