Earlier this week Fardad posted a wealth of new information to the assignment 2 wiki page in regards to the classes that we are creating. With (somewhat) final specs to work off of, I was finally able to get started on some code this morning. The class I was working on was IO_Edit – which is actually quite tricky in that it is set up to inherit from both the IO_Field class and the IO_Frame class. Due to pure coincidence or luck, those classes were 2 of the classes I had assigned to Chris and Tyler and they had mostly done them already and checked them in. Technically all I needed at this point were the constructors for those two classes in order to get started, so if necessary I could have done those quickly too if they weren’t already created.
This coincidence actually brings something important to my attention – that being, my lack of attention to the specs when I originally assigned the classes to my group members as tasks. Of course, since at the time only 4 classes had information on them, there was not much else for me to do. I’m going to have to give the specs a full read so I know which classes have dependencies that will need to be satisfied first. I’m starting to think I may want to make a quick model (UML or something fancy in Visio) to get a nice visual view of how the classes map out. This will help exponentially once we move beyond the base specs and try to add new features into the project (as an addendum once the base program is complete, of course). This is just one little lesson that I ran into rather indirectly but it will definitely be something that proves to be invaluable. Of course, when you think about it, it’s common sense – but often in the rush of things you forget the small things like this. Running into the potential ‘wall’ like this gives myself something small in terms of personal reminder to make sure I step back first.