Journal 50

 July 22 - July 28

Generally, I write longer journal entries summarizing my work and learning for the week, but this week's prompt specifically asked for a few sentences, so I will try to limit my rambling and make it a bit more concise. I assume there is a lot of code to grade in the projects, so a few sentences suffice for our journals. With that being said, this week I learned about the role of larger tests in software engineering and why / how they complement unit tests. I learned about the concept of fidelity, where larger tests more closely reflect the behavior of the real system, even though they require more time, cost, and maintenance. I also learned that large tests rely on both seeded and test traffic, and they follow a workflow of preparing the system under test, seeding data, performing actions, and verifying the expected behavior. In our Github project, I continued developing the front end through branches and pull requests, which further reinforces how larger tests are important for validating that multiple components work together correctly after code from different developers is integrated. Working on the front end in GitHub emphasized how collaboration and comprehensive testing go hand in hand. Writing the code is only part of the project, designing effective tests is just as important for finding issues that unit tests alone cannot detect.