Chapter 4

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Chapter 3

1. What is the purpose of the project approach strategy?

   The project approach strategy will help you maintain a feeling of forward momentum and a sense of progress when working on difficult programming projects.

2. What is the purpose of the development cycle?

   The development cycle provides you with a repeatable process that will result in the successful implementation of your project.

3. Describe how to apply the project approach strategy and development cycle in an iterative fashion.

   When faced with your first, or difficult, project, use the approach strategy to clarify the project requirements, problem domain, language features, and project design approach. When you are ready to proceed with the implementation phase of your project you apply the development cycle by taking a piece of your design, planning its implementation, coding the implementation, testing the code, and integrating the results with previous project components if required. Repeat the development cycle as required until you complete the project.

4. Why is it a good idea to do just enough design to get started coding? Does this approach have practical application in the real programming world? What future problems regarding application design does using this approach help to avoid?

   You want to test your design for soundness. (Is it a good design?) The idea is to catch design problems early in the project. (The earlier the better)

   Yes, the approach has practical application in the real world.

   This approach will help detect serious problems with application architecture.

5. How is function stubbing used in the robot rat project?

   Function stubbing is used to defer the implementation of certain functions until after the application framework has been tested.

6. Why is component testing important?

   Component testing is important because you want to verify the proper operation of component before integrating them into the bigger program.

7. Why is frequent component integration important?

   You want to detect any potential problems as soon as possible. Early and frequent integration will answer the question: 'Did my new code break my good, tested code?'

8. What is the purpose of pseudocode?

   To describe processing steps in natural language that can be easily translated into a programming language.

9. What is the purpose of a state transition diagram?

   To illustrate valid object states and the events that result in object state changes.

10. What C++ flow control structure can be used to implement the functionality described by a state transition diagram?

    switch statement

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