MyISERN 1.3 review

Today's assignment is MyIsern-1.3-review. I'm reviewing the team orange code, which is here.

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Installation

The package I downloaded was myisern-orange-1.3-1.0.1114.zip. There was no installation guide, but it installed fine using the installation process we're all using. I had to look up a few things that would have been in the installation guide, but the installation worked.

JUnit, Checkstyle, PMD, and FindBugs tasks all ran cleanly.

Code Format and Conventions

Nothing really leapt out at me as far as coding conventions, except that some of the comments are out of date.

I would recommend that they split things up into multiple ActionBeans rather than just expanding the ActionBean from StackStripes to do everything, but that's not really a coding convention.

Test Cases

Emma Coverage summary

class:	14%	(3/22)
method:	1%	(3/215)
block:	1%	(16/3032)
line:	1%	(7/773)

White Box & Black Box

There are two tests: a test that the welcome page can be retrieved and a test that is turned off and prints out the number of records loaded from XML.

From both a white box and a black box perspective, this is rather limited testing.

Breaking

• Trying to list or edit anything causes a null pointer exception
• Trying to add a record causes a file not found exception. I think this one is caused by looking for the files in the wrong place. The directory is supposed to named .myisern, not myisern. (It's supposed to have a period at the beginning.)

User Interface

I was able to use the interface.

It uses very little screen space and works fine with only a quarter of my (small) screen.

The one thing I would improve is the labeling of the links on the main page. The links should probably contain the name of what they do ("edit" or "add"), so you don't have to look up at the table headers to figure it out. It seems like a small thing, but it threw me off at first.

Summary and Lessons Learned

This version of MyISERN doesn't do any of the things it's supposed to, but it's a pleasant improvement over the last piece of software I reviewed.

It compiles, installs, and runs. It doesn't run correctly, but that didn't get in the way of writing a review.

It will, however, need to run correctly by Monday.