Commission Calculation Combination Program Paper
Learning Team C
PRG-420
10/18/2012

We are tasked to combine the works of two team members; which on its own is quit a difficult task when we come right down to it. This is true for many reasons like skill, knowledge of the program, and style. All of which can sink a program before you even run it for the first time. We chose the two of our group members whose programs we most compatible to each others. In hope that the two programmer’s code worked together and could be a match when it is all done in the end; with the choice made and the code matched here is what we have done with the two programs to make one functioning program.
The key component that makes combining two program’s code feasible is object oriented programming (OOP). With OOP a program is modular with each component being independent of other sections of the code. A class can be given requirements such as having certain attributes and methods. As long as a component maintains these attributes, a designer can make certain assumptions about a class without having to see unique code that is goes into creating the output.
For this task, both Michael and Andrew’s code were chosen because they took similar approaches in creating a salesperson object that maintained certain attributes such as pay rate, calculating the pay including the percentage of their pay that came from sales. With this information the pay calculation program can make the same assumptions from one program to the other, despite what attribute and method names were used.
Once the two programs were selected the next task was to select which classes should be combined. There was some level of bias for the selected class but given the compilation errors found during the review of the prior week’s code it was deemed easiest to use Michael’s Payroll Program class and Andrew’s Salesperson class. This just leaves identifying if there are any attributes or methods that were in Andrew’s Salesperson class, and adjusting or refactoring the names for the attributes and methods called either in the Payroll Program class or in the Salesperson class. The class name used in the Payroll Program for the Salesperson class was adjusted as need accordingly.
For this task there were a few specific changes than needed to be made to the Sales Person class. The first was with the class constructor. Because the Payroll Program class allows the end user to specify the employee’s name and salary, the class constructor needed to be extended to allow the class to be created with these attributes to be assigned. Another problem that existed was with the use of floating point numbers in the Payroll Program class, while the Sales Person class used double precision floating point numbers. While there is nothing wrong with either variable type, having to specifically cast the variable type seemed excessive to the double precision floating point numbers were changed to regular floating point numbers.
There were some additional methods that needed to be added to the Sales Person class as there was functionality in the Payroll Program class that were not accounted for in the other program. The Calculate Pay method was added for the delimiting factor of an employee not meeting their sales target, or the sales not adding to the compensation until $80,000 in sales were achieved. Finally two methods were added to return the employee’s name and the employee’s total sales as these methods were not accounted for in the Sales Person’s original program.
Once these changes were made the code compiled without issue and fulfilled all of the requirements of the week four coding tasks. No other adjustments were needed because of the flexibility seen with object oriented programming. When working with multiple developers in a large project, having a program that is modular is crucial as code can be checked in or out with ease.
For this assignment we took parts of what is the same program and put them together in a mish-mash of code to complete this java program we all have worked hard on for the past few weeks. We learned how the misplacement of a few lines of code would change the results of what you are trying to achieve with your program. We learn the importance of strings and loops and why each is important to a program. We learned with the OOP you can bring together the hard work of different programmers to build on solid program that you as a team can be proud of. Showing that any piece of code can be changed and can be switched moved around and replaced by other code is one of the great points to this language we call JAVA. Coding is a hard task and as well have learned these 5 short weeks it can be fun as well.