Giving and Taking Criticism

Doing peer reviews of other people's implementations of the User Command Interface for the Wattdepot project was very interesting. Both projects that I reviewed had implemented their systems very differently. Both groups split their programs up, but one group implemented their program using an interface, while the other group implemented their program by extending their classes from the main class. Anther interesting aspect of the two implementations was the fact that one group hadn't used any methods in their different classes, but just used System.out.println() within a constructor. I guess I am saying that it took some time getting used to each group's coding style before I was able to review each group. One of the most important things that I have learned from looking at other people's code is the importance of Javadoc comments. I was able to easily read through the code that had good documentation of what was going on.

It was interesting reading other peoples review of our system. The 5 reviewers of our system had similar critiques of our system. Basically each of the reviewers talked about our lack of test cases and having too many methods within one class. These are very true comments and I agree with their review. While working on the project I made the stupid mistake of trying to write in all the test cases for my code after finishing my code. I also need to organize my code better and not put everything into one class. Something I learned that helped a lot when looking at reviews of our system, was when reviewers would write in exactly what command they inputted that failed to work while they were testing our code.

The most helpful reviews were the reviews which contained constructive criticism. Most of the reviewers review of our system were constructive with the exception of one. While reading the reviews, one comment about my group's projects was that we have written our code in "spaghetti code." This is a very harsh comment that did nothing to help our group improve our system since the comment ended there. This reviewer did not specify what parts of our code was "spaghetti code." Writing comments without giving evidence just confused me because I didn't what what exactly made our groups code hard to read. Besides having one long file, I thought that our groups code was easy to follow.