Design,Testing and IDE's

Design,Testing and IDE's

1. Defensive design

   • Programmers try to protect their programs through defensive design
   • Input sanitisation - removing any unwanted characteristics before passing data through the program
   • Input validation - Checking if data meets certain criteria before passing it into the program
   • A whitelist is a list of all data that a program should accept -any data that isn't on the whitelist will be rejected
   • A black list is a list of all the data that a program should reject- any data that isn't on the blacklist will be accepted
   • Authentication can confirm the identity of a user before they're allowed to access certain pieces of data or features of the program

2. Testing

   • A test plan will outline exactly what you're going to test and how you're going to test it.
   • Normal data - things that a user is likely to input into the program
   • Extreme (boundary) data - values at the limit of what the program should be able to handle
   • Erroneous data - inputs that the program should not accept

3. IDE's

   • IDE - Internal Development Environments
   • An IDE is a piece of software that provides features to help a programmer to develop their program
   • IDE's provide programmers with lots of handy tools when they're coding
   • The code editor is the main part of an IDE. Most editors have line numbering and auto colour coding for things like strings, functions ,loops,variables and comments. Good code editors will also have other automatic features like auto-correct, auto indentation and auto-complete
   • A translator will translate the source code into machine code. If IDE has both then you can take advantage of the each translator's best feature
   • A Graphical user interface (GUI) helps the programmer design a user interface by building it up graphically rather than having to design it using source code

4. Translators

   • there are 3 types of translators : An interpreter, a compiler and an assembler
   • low-level languages are tricky for a human to read and write but are easier for a computer to run
   • Translators convert programming languages into machine code
   • Assemblers are used to turn assembly language into machine code
   • Compilers and interpreters are both used to turn high-level code into machine code
   • A compiler translates the source code and an executable file