Mike Divine's Learning Journal

This week in my Software Engineering Class, I learned about Selenium System Testing and using the Chrome Driver to create automated tests. I wrote 5 unit tests this week using SpringBootTest and the MockMVC framework.  I learned a lot about how tests should be laid out and testing one method at a time so everything is contained and other methods don't affect each other and the tests don't affect each other. Using Selenium and the Chrome Web Driver was something new that I hadn't had experience with before and I enjoyed learning about creating automated tests. I have loved learning a lot of new things every week and look forward to learning more in the coming weeks.

This week we worked on the front end of our College Enrollment System.  We used React to create the front-end pages that dealt with the back-end API we worked on last week.  React to me has a much higher learning curve than other things I've worked to learn and understand.  I have started to understand how React Hooks work so that you can have React update the state when you change it.  That is pretty slick and I really like components that can be reused as needed which makes a lot of sense to me. Overall I feel that Web Development is the area I would like to continue in and have a career in so I have really enjoyed this class so far and look forward to continue learning.

Week 2 has been a lot of coding and teamwork with our software development assignment. The project entails making a functioning REST Backend with Spring Boot Java and JPA project that acts as a University System for enrollments, assignments, and grades. The majority of our time this week went into Assignment 2. Figuring out the RESTful backend using Spring Boot Java and JPA was a formidable yet rewarding task. Working with the team and keeping communication was a major factor in us making everything work well together as a team. Testing everything with Postman was tough and very time-consuming but it showed that everything was working properly or if we had to work out bugs, which we had many.  I learned a lot and am excited to get into React next week! A Mock object, in unit testing with JUnit, is a simulated version of a real object. It allows for controlled and predictable behavior during testing. The primary purpose of using mocks in unit testing is to isolate the code under tes...

We started off focusing on JUnit testing.  Writing test cases to ensure the functionality of the example code taught me a better understanding of how to approach software development with testing as a must-have. We learned about Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) principles and Pivotal Tracker. This taught me to think more about user needs, system functionalities, and acceptance criteria. By using BDD, I learned how to articulate requirements, ensuring alignment between stakeholders and development teams. As I reflect on the concepts learned and the skills acquired, I am ready to apply them to our future challenges and projects. I thought we would be doing more coding to start but it looks like we will be doing more of that this upcoming weeks and I'm looking forward to it.