Maintenance Document

The toolkit is a large collection of object many of which depend on each other for their function. Classes for the core toolkit were written and tested in a specific order to try to minimise the construction of test harnesses. The Random and Ending classes are entirely self contain and so they were chosen for the initial stages of implementation. Each test harness used tries all method calls individually and also in certain combinations which might otherwise have hidden certain flaws. Next the Representation, Evaluation, and Individual were written. Each of these has very minimal interfaces and required only small harnesses. The Population, Selection, and Fitness classes form a sequence of dependence and their creation and testing followed this. Because of its smaller size Model was written next although testing was held back. The most difficult implementation area was the Creation class and its children which are all highly connected. Testing of these classes was combined with the integration of all other classes. Fault finding was more difficult because of this but otherwise complex test harnesses would have been required. After the initial problems had been solved in the simplest possible toolkit organisation new components were completed and tested in place.