Page 119 - DCAP404 _Object Oriented Programming
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Object-oriented Programming
Notes Bug Tracking
Another situation is of a product support project, in which the team found the number of
reported bugs to be high owing to the complexity of the system, new releases and features.
“It was difficult to track the status and progress of each bug since the backlog of defects
was high…”
Here comes the relevance of a bug tracking system, a database containing the entire
history of the bug, as the author instructs. The system – with info about priority, author,
owner, target release, abstract and so on – can be updated through mails based on the bug
ID, and communicated automatically to the identified recipients, he adds.
“The mails keep the team updated on the new bugs and the respective solutions. Include
this as a process improvement so that the projects would have an automated bug tracking
system for education and information seeding,”.
Comfort Levels
Mantra six calls for steering the comfort levels, such as enhancing the delight level of end
customers. Sample this context, described by Rao: The customer, a bank, wanted to
implement new software but wanted to retain the existing front-ends as the end users
were comfortable with the same.
The software vendor began by seeking feedback from the users in the bank; finding that
the user community was conversant and comfortable with the old screens, the vendor
collected data from the front-ends of the old application and transferred the same to the
database of the new application.
“Once the data transfer was completed, it was processed to retain the same front-ends on
the new application. All this ran transparently.” And the outcome, Rao concludes, was that
end-users’ comfort level could be kept very high, as they did not see any changes on the
front-end screens of the new application.
Instructive Read
Five Generations of Programming Language
The Visual Studio development environment is ‘an extremely powerful fifth-generation
tool,’ says Rod Stephens in Visual Basic 2010: Programmer’s reference
(www.wileyindia.com).
“It provides graphical editors to make building forms and editing properties easy and
intuitive; IntelliSense to help developers remember what to type next; auto-completion
so developers can use meaningful variable names without needing to waste time typing
them completely by hand; tools that show call hierarchies indicating which routines call
which others; and breakpoints, watches, and other advanced debugging tools that make
building applications easier,” he describes.
Fifth-generation languages or 5GLs emphasise on the development environment rather
than the language itself; they provide powerful, highly graphical development
environments to allow developers to use the underlying language in more sophisticated
ways, informs the author in a discussion of the different generations.
1-2-3-4
The previous generation, of the 4GLs, was of ‘natural languages’ such as SQL. They let
developers use a language that is sort of similar to a human language to execute
programming tasks, explains Stephens. “For example, the SQL statement ‘SELECT * FROM
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