gardners/2014SE3 — pull request #124 by law0102 (2014-06-05 04:02:52+00:00)
Title: added law0102 to p5,p7,p8

# Prac 5 testplan
* https://github.com/law0102/se3prac3/blob/master/testplan.md

# Prac 7 tests
* https://github.com/law0102/IncrementalRPG/blob/se3prac7/scripttest.js
* https://github.com/law0102/IncrementalRPG/blob/se3prac7/test.html

# Prac 8 reflection
I found pair programming to be very useful. My group consisted of two American students, one which was a computer science major, Adam, and the other who did not know much programming, Tim. I felt it was a good synergy, as when either Adam or I were explaining what certain functions were going to achieve, we made sure that Tim could mostly understand it. For the most part, Tim just sat back and contributed little.

Only Adam and I were programming for this exercise. I found it very beneficial, as we used both a computer for writing the program, and a laptop to search the C++ API for what functions we could implement. This sped up the process by a lot, as one of us would be writing the code, while the other was looking at what was needed for the next component of the code. By looking at the code someone else was writing, it was much easier to find mistakes in it, both syntactically and logically.

The main difficulties we experienced was that Adam and I both are used to different ways to do things. For example, Adam always preferred using printf, while I liked to use cout. This made the code a little hard to work with, as we both tried to use the code the other preferred.

Overall, our code was not very functional. We tried to incorporate a base structure for the code, so we could easily implement each different date input as we found them. We quickly found the problem that the UNIX time for most of the further away dates, would be larger than the maximum int. At this point, we realised that our program was not going to work. At this stage, we both decided to give up on the programming exercise.
There is very little I would change with this pair programming exercise, as everything, for the most part, ran smoothly. I think if we spent more time on the designing phase, we would have seen the problem of the seconds being larger than the capacity of integers.

In the future, I would probably use pair programming again. It is a faster way to code, having someone write the code while the other is searching the API and other examples of code.