Trimming the fat

Just this week, we were assigned to starter events for Devcathlon (the Hackystat Game). Unfortunately, things didn't go as smoothly as planned so an extension was given so we would have a chance to improve our work.

My starter event, "Best Coverage", was done for the most part. But it did contain unnecessary parts of code (e.g. retrieving build data, when not really required) and could have been improved by adding static final to some of the instance variables.

I also broke one of our Coding Standards that was set back in ICS 413 (Software Engineering 1) when I used a while loop. I am ashamed. Other than this, the main issues I needed to address are as follows:

1. Build Data

I originally imitated the KeepTheCoverageHigh class by reading in build data as well. What's continuous integration build data have to do with coverage? Nothing really. But I figured it was used because the event will be run once a day, the same interval Hudson runs. So if there hasn't been a build, then there should be no new coverage either. However, the event now ignores that, and just checks for the most recent coverage information. This is probably better since its independent from the continuous integration data.

2. Static Final Variables

This is definitely useful for other classes to use. It's hard to keep a track of string variables especially ones that are used for specific fields. It's also a pain in the butt to use the hardcoded string each time I need the field. Making static helps because I can just access it by something like BestCoverage.dayStreakKey in any classes outside of itself. Well final is simply because we don't want or need the string to ever change.

It's also nice to look in one place and never need to hunt for every occurance of the string when a change is in order.

Besides that, my event should be done. I do feel awful that I went M.I.A. yesterday and most of today. I had a slight fever and cold and decided to rest. At least I wasn't M.I.A. for 3 days, or else Daniel's event would dock some points from me. I do notice a lot of errors has been happening and I think I need to look over those errors now. That way, I learn and I know what to do if that were to happen to me.