tech-placements-19-20

UNiDAYS Discounts Programming Challenge

Running the .jar

Run the .jar directly:

Inside the src folder there is a .jar that can be run. Download the .jar file, move it into a directory that can be accessed via the command line. Run the .jar using the command java -jar jarFile.jar on a UNIX or LINUX shell (Works the same way on MacOS).

Alternatively:

If the .jar doesn't run then please follow the following steps:

• Download this project (You may exclude the README and .gitignore files if you wish)
• Create a new java project in IntelliJ (prefferably, but eclipse should work as well)
• You can now import the source folder
• You can run the Main class (Make sure that you are using Java 10 for this project), or alternatively you can compile the project
• Should you want to run the JUnit tests, please ensure that you have JUnit 4 installed

Please note that this is a command line application

Java Version

Built on: Java 10.0.2

Testing dependency: JUnit4

IDE: IntelliJ, July 24th 2018, 2018.2 Build

JAR: The .jar was compiled on a Macbook running High Sierra 10.13.6

Approaching the problem

The first step for me was to read through the problem and determine what actors are invlolved in this task. Uppon doing this I came up with the following objects that interact with eachother:

• ShoppingBasket: This can be a class that is responsible for keeping track of it's items
• ShoppingItems: This can also be a class, whos responsibility it is to set up what an Item actually is

After having found the 2 major classes that I will be working with, I started to wonder how these two classes would interact. This entailed that I establish the properties of the two classes. I knew that the ShoppingItems class would have to keep creating objects multiple times. For the ShoppingBasket class this is not the case due to the fact that we typically only have a single shopping basket where we place our ShoppingItems, hence why I opted to make ShoppingBasket a singleton.

I decided to take a test driven approach which entailed that I create an extensive set of unit tests which must be passed. After writing my unit tests I started to work on the classes, running the tests every time a feature was developed and amended.

The reason why I did this was mainly due to the fact that using a test driven approach would make it a lot easier to find out where and why my program is failing, before moving onto a new part. Hence allowing me to establish total correctness before moving on to a new feature of the code.