My Experience with Software Review

I was tasked with reviewing a project of some fellow peers and also to provide insightful feedback to help them better their results. While I did this, a few revelations came to me through their own feedback of my project. The comments have made me aware something.

A major point stressed in the beginning of the semester by my professor in ICS 413 was that when you are creating Open Source Software there are "three prime directives." One of these directives was being able to create software that users could work with effectively and understanding it. I feel that, I have been weak especially in that department. A common comment I got was "it needed more error checks." It reflects bad on my understanding of interfaces because one of the most common habits people have is to use something without reading the manual. I need to make it so that human error is not a major factor in the program. I know I cannot totally provide a solution to the things that can happen, but testing and error checks can help.

I also learned about development through this review process. It was quite surprising and amusing. I learned that I had some strengths and also weaknesses in programming and so did my peers. I never thought to do validations for certain inputs like the html address, but the others did. One of my strengths was that I had a strict coding standard in terms of grammar and getting the details right. When I used the command line built by the other students, it was bad. Their system was not as clean as mine, but they had better program testing. Whereas I had done more happy tests to make the program work better on the command line, they had done testing to provide coverage on the unit and behavioral level. I was kind of narrow minded that way. What I was focusing on was the way the program ran and how the user felt. That's why I was really annoyed when the other programs did not work as expected. For example, they had a help command that printed the syntax of the commands to be inputted. But it didn't work. I had to tediously check the source code to figure out exactly how to input the values and get the right results. On the other hand, I had worked very hard on this portion of my program.

This review has led me to look at programming in a changed manner. Although students are taught not to work together in the first years of computer science, it's become essential in software development because of the different techniques and approaches other programmers have for a specific task. It's made me want to continuously seek input from my peers in order to get a well-rounded outlook on what needs to done to write good programs.