Design Discussion Lab

Due Friday at the beginning of class

Objectives

• To analyze software design decisions

Motivation: Throughout this class, we'll talk a lot about design decisions. You and/or your computer science instructors have been making design decisions for awhile. Let's thoughtfully consider some design decisions, articulate the impact of the decisions, and hone our decision-making skills.

Design Discussion

Let's consider some design decisions from the provided code. For each of the following questions, first confirm my first intro/set up statement. Then, in a document, answer the questions:

• turn is an instance variable of the Game class. Is it better design for turn to be a local, instance, or class variable? Justify your answer.
• user_input is a local variable in the getInput method of the ConnectFour class. Is it better design for user_input to be a local, instance, or class variable? Justify your answer.
• RANKS is a class variable of the Card class. Is it better design for RANKS to be a local, instance, or class variable? Justify your answer.
• tokens is an instance variable of the ConnectFour class. Is it better design for tokens to be a local, instance, or class variable? Justify your answer.
• Player is a class in warGame.py. Is it better design for the Player class to be defined in warGame.py or in game.py? Justify your answer.
• WarGame's step method takes as a parameter dummyInput. What purpose does it serve?

Synthesis and Reflection

• Hopefully, in your process of writing the explanations, you got some clarity about how to determine what kind of variable should be used to represent various information. Go back and refine your answers, as applicable, with the clarity you had at the end.
• With that clarity, what questions should you ask to determine if a variable should be a local, instance, or class variable? Answer in your document.
• What made reading/understanding the code easy? What made it difficult? How could it be improved to make it more readable/understandable? (Again, answer in your document.)

Submitting your assignment

Show Professor Sprenkle your assignment during the beginning of class on Friday.

Grading (10 pts)

You will be graded on making a good-faith effort in answering the above questions.