Week 11: "Good Coverage"

Y'all. We only have about 3.5 weeks of classes left!

I'm here to report on my awesome pair programming experience. Though we had a shorter period of time for Project 4, I really liked the assignment. It was fun to work with my partner and think through each step of the project before we began writing any code. My favorite aspect of this experience was having unit tests written as the main code was being developed.

In Project 3, I really honed in on writing unit tests for Python classes. It was fun but frustrating because my partner and I waited until our code was fully functional before writing the unit tests. Despite the frustration, in the end we were able to achieve 99% coverage! This time around, writing the unit tests during the code development process proved to be so much more efficient. We were able to perfect each major code segment and thoroughly test it before moving on. It was great and once we were done writing code for assignment functionality, we realized that we were also done writing testing code. The cherry on the top? We achieved 91% coverage!

At the beginning of the semester we were introduced to "coverage" and I wasn't too sure what it meant or why it is so significant in software design. In short, your % coverage shows how well you tested your code. The higher the percentage, the better! A tip on getting higher coverage is to test methods or functions that call other methods or functions. The calls require your tests to check several sections of your code at once thereby increasing your coverage without writing too many unit tests!

Have a wonderful week friends!
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JL