Download High-Quality Programming Code Construction

Creating an Award Winning
Project for the IT Olympiad
Best Practices and Mistakes to Avoid
Svetlin Nakov
Telerik Corporation
www.telerik.com
Table of Contents
1.
National IT Olympiad – Evaluation Criteria
2.
Good and Bad Projects – Examples
3.
Choosing a Project for the Olympiad
2
Evaluation Criteria at the
National IT Olympiad
For Software Projects and Internet Applications
Original Idea and Innovation
 Projects should bring some
innovation
 Not repeating exactly something existing
 E.g. “Just Another Media Player” will not be
considered as an original and innovative idea
 Innovation could be in various
areas
 Solve a task which has not been previously
addressed
 Introduce an unique new approach
 Conceptually change the way some software
applications work
4
Solve a Significant Problem
 Projects should solve a
significant problem
 Do people really need this product or service?
 Projects should solve a complex problem
 Which cannot be solved easily by hand or by
another software
 Example of significant
problem
 Crate a software to find all articles in Internet
about some person and auto-summarize them
 Example of non-significant problem
 Create a simple summator of numbers
5
Well Working Functionality
 The product / service should
do its job and do it
well
 Work well and as expected
 Stable (not crashing)
 Bug free
 Good usability
 Easy to use, intuitive UI
 Good performance
6
Project is in Finished State
 To be award-winning
the project should be in
finished state
 Fully implemented
 Should have installer / uninstaller
 Should have documentation, users
manual, built-in help system, etc.
 Should have all its functions implemented
 All hyperlinks / buttons / menus should work
 Don't put menus and buttons that do nothing!
7
Honor Licenses and Copyright
 Honor the license agreements and copyright
for all tools, frameworks and products used
 Use free or open-source software
 Use trial version or licensed version of
commercial tools
 Use open-source or licensed libraries,
components, frameworks, toolkits, etc.
 Honor the license restrictions
and requirements
8
Appropriate Technologies
 Use appropriate
technologies, e.g.
 If you create a game, use a suitable game
engine / game SDK / game framework
 If you manage data, use a database (RDBMS),
not plain text files as data storage
 If you create reports, use a reporting engine
 Use technologies efficiently and correctly, e.g.
 Organize data in the database correctly
 If you play video, ensure streaming is enabled
9
Good Architecture
 Choose appropriate
software architecture for
the application
 Split the application into layers
 Use 2-tier / 3-tier / n-tier
architecture when appropriate
 Split the application into components
 Strong cohesion (components should do only one
thing, should solve a single task, not many)
 Loose coupling (components should be
independent of each other)
10
Good Architecture (2)
 More about the good software architecture
 Separate UI from the business logic
 Don't mix different types of functionality
 Minimal complexity (don't do overdesign)
 Ensure it is easy to maintain
 If you need to introduce a new field in a form,
how many files you need to change?
 Think about reusability (avoid duplicated logic)
 Think about the security
11
Intuitive UI and Good Usability
 Use intuitive and easy-to-use user interface
 Usability is important!
 Users should work with ease
 Good usability
includes:
 Clean and consistent navigation concept
 Make functionality and actions obvious
 Clean and consistent way of entering data
 Easy to use way of presenting information
 Suitable fonts, layout, and design
12
High-Quality Code
 Follow the principles of
high-quality
code construction
 Code should be easy-to-read
 Code should be easy-to-understand
 Code should be maintainable (easy to modify)
 Code should work correctly in all use-cases
 Unit tests and other tests are highly appreciated
 Code should be self-documenting
 Code should be well formatted
13
High-Quality Code (2)

All identifiers should have good names
 Projects, directories, namespaces, classes,
methods, properties, variables, parameters, …

Code formatting should follow its logical structure

Classes should have good abstraction,
strong cohesion and loose coupling

Methods should have strong cohesion
and loose coupling

Variables' scope, span and lifetime should be
minimized
14
High-Quality Code (3)
 Repeating code should be avoided
 Complex expressions
should be avoided
 Constants should be used to avoid duplicating
values and values likely to change
 Control-flow should
be simple
 Avoid deeps nesting of if-statements and loops
 All public methods should check their
input
data for correctness (defensive programming)
 Methods should throw an exception in case of
not being able to do their job
15
High-Quality Code (4)
 In case of Web applications,
follow strictly the
W3C standards
 All HTML / CSS / XML should conform to the
standards (use the W3C validator)
 Ensure your application works on all popular
Web browsers
 Separate the UI from the business logic
 Think about the mobile / tablet users
 In GUI applications
run any time-consuming
job in background and show a progress bar
16
Performance

Your application should have good performance
 Test the application with large data sets
 Use efficient data structures
 Use efficient algorithms
 Tune-up the database performance
 E.g. add column indices or apply table partitioning


Use precomputations to reduce the overhead
Beware of optimizing the code
when not necessary!
17
Easy Installation
 Design your application
to be easy-to-install
 Installation should be simple and automatic
 After few clicks users should be able to run your
application
 Ensure your installation installs all required
additional software (e.g. databases, engines,
components, frameworks, scripts, etc.)
 Use standard installers
 People are already familiar with them
 Ensure you have uninstallation!
18
Code and Data Security
 Make your
application secure!
 Validate all your input data
 Use SSL or other encryption
to transfer sensitive data
 Ensure SQL-injection is not possible
 Avoid building SQL commands with + operator
 Avoid cross-site scripting attacks
 Ensure all data is HTML-escaped in Web apps
 Always encrypt passwords and sensitive data
19
Process Errors Correctly
 Process
errors and unusual situations correctly
 Ensure your code handles all possible situations
 Always check the input data!
 When some action could not be
performed, show and error message
 Adequate error message is better than exception
dump, application crash or misbehavior
 Never return incorrect result when the input data
is incorrect!
 Ensure your error messages are correct
20
Use Database Correctly

Ensure your data schema is normalized
 Avoid repeating data in the database

Use foreign keys between related records

Use integrity constrains when appropriate

Implement correctly update and delete
 E.g. what happens when you delete a non-empty
category – what happens with the related records?

Use data versioning when appropriate

Use transactions when a business operation
consists of a sequence of database operations
21
UI Design
 Use good looking and consistent UI design
 Ensure you support all popular Web
browsers (for Web applications)
 Ensure you support all operating
systems you claim to support
 Ensure the UI is standard and widely accepted
 Ensure fonts / colors / icons are adequate
 Test the application in low screen resolution
 Use some open-source or some popular UI
design if you are not good in UI design
22
Good Presentation and
Defense of the Project
 Presenting the project well
is of
a tremendous importance!
 Your talk and demo at the public
defense should be outstanding
 Your presentation should be carefully prepared
 Ensure you fit in the allowed time limit
 15 minutes presentation + 5 minutes questions
 Always perform a training before the
presentation!
23
Creating a Good Presentation

Use PowerPoint or other presentation software

Good presentation should focus on the key
features and functionality, not on details
 Ensure you don't have too much text!
 Presentations are not articles, just short notes
 Ensure most of your presentation is live demo!
 Use good graphics design for the presentation
 Use pictures to strengthen the text
 Typically you should have up to 10 slides
(3-5 minutes) + 10-12 minutes demo
24
Making an Attractive Demo
 Performing an attractive
demo is a must!
 The most important thing for the jury is to see
your application in action
 Perform live demonstration in 10-12 minutes
 Focus on the key functionalities, not on details
 Always prepare in advance a good data set to
demonstrate your application
 Use meaningful data, not "hghfds" or "user1"
 Follow well prepared demonstration scenario
 Show functionality working well, not bugs
25
Prepare Good Documentation
 The IT Olympiad requires all
projects to have
 Good project documentation
 Follow the official requirements and structure
 Topic, Authors, Advisor, Resume, Goals, Stages
of the Project, Level of Complexity, Architecture,
Implementation, Users Guide, Conclusion
 Use a nice looking design and layout
 Use attractive screenshots and figures
 Brochures or other marketing materials
 Prepare some kind of marketing materials
26
Good and Bad Projects
Examples
Examples of Good Projects

Examples of good project ideas:
 Create an application that analyzes in real time a
security camera and automatically detects
suspicious persons / activities
 Create an application that summarizes the
information on the Web about given person /
company / and produces Wikipedia-style article
 Create a mobile healthcare application which
measures health indicators (such as hearth
rhythm, blood pressure, blood sugar, etc.) and
sends it continuously to a healthcare database
28
Examples of Good Projects (2)

Examples of good project ideas:
 Mobile child tracking application that reports the
location of given mobile phone at some time
interval (e.g. at 10 minutes) and shows it on a map
 Create a software for auto converting a book or
article to a high-quality PowerPoint presentation
 Design and implement an Access Control System
with RFID cards and Google Maps visualization
 Very original social network with new unique
communication model and other unique concepts
 Kinect based home theater system
29
Look for Hot Technologies
 Kinect
 Multi-Touch in Windows 7
 emotiv neuroheadset
30
Look for Hot Technologies (2)
 Cloud Computing
 Windows Azure – free students accounts
 Google AppEngine – absolutely free!
 Mobile Development
 Applications for smart phones and tablets
 Social Networks
 Facebook applications
 Embedded Applications
31
Examples of Bad Projects
 Examples of bad project ideas:
 Video player like Media Player Classic
 Simple text editor like Notepad
 Mobile English-Bulgarian dictionary
 Simple ZIP archiving tool like 7ZIP
 Flash-based tutorial that displays HTML
content (e.g. Geography lessons)
 Just another online shopping cart
 Just another discussion forum / blog system
32
Choosing a Project for the
National IT Olympiad
Step by Step
Choosing a Project
for the Olympiad
 Step 1:
 Generate Ideas (Brainstorming)
 Step 2:
 Assess Ideas (Feasibility)
 Step 3:
 Implement Ideas (Coding)
 Step 4:
 Work out the Details (Finalizing)
34
Generate Ideas (Brainstorming)
 Collect all
your exciting new ideas
 Some could be incredible, strange or even crazy
 Don't think about the implementation (at this
stage), just unlock your imagination
 Organize a brainstorming
event
with your friends and fellows
 Check out what the others do
 Imagine Cup – imaginecup.com
 TED Conference – www.ted.com
 TopCoder – http://community.topcoder.com
35
Assess Ideas (Feasibility)
 Assess
your ideas generated during the
brainstorming
 Which ideas you (and your team) can really
implement in practice?
 How many time each idea will take?
 If the idea needs very complicated work, can
you simplify it?
 How can you simplify your idea
to make it feasible?
36
Implement Ideas (Coding)
 Implement the ideas
step by step
 Create a solid team (developers, designers, etc.)
 Choose appropriate technologies (platform,
programming language, database server, UI
technology, etc.)
 Create architecture that will work
 Implement the features one by one
 Follow the industry agile
development techniques
37
Work out the Details (Finalizing)
 Be sure to work out the details
 Never leave good ideas unfinished
 Fully implement all features
 Create well working functionality, well tested
 Create installer / uninstaller
 Create required documentation
 Create intuitive UI and good usability
 Ensure code quality is good
 Follow the best industry practices
38
Creating an Award Winning
Project for the IT Olympiad
Questions?
http://academy.telerik.com