Task:

• Read and try to understand source code of an actual playable open source game.
• Write an essay discussing the code quality and maintainability of the codebase.

Topic selection table: here

Each topic can be selected maximum of 3 times. If you have an excellent topic to propose, then up to two additional topics may be added to the table based on your suggestions. The deadline for suggestions is at the end of class on 29.03.

As this is an essay, you are free to approach the topic in any way you like. Although if you are struggling with ideas, then here are some discussion points for you:

• Discuss the quality of the project based on code quality metrics.
• Discuss the quality of the project based on object-oriented programming best practices.
• Discuss the overall code quality and maintainability of the source code.
• Were there comments? Where the comments helpful?
• Did you find any design patterns in the source code?
• Which ones?
• What were the features that were implemented using the patterns?
• What kind of effect did the patterns have on the code base? (Positive, negative, none?; how?/why?)
• Were there parts of the code, that could have been implemented better using a pattern?
• Did knowledge of some patterns help you understand the implementation of a feature better? Which? How?
• Did you try or were you able to build and run the project?
• Did you understand enough of the codebase to be able to start making modifications?

Partial score for this task is received for participation in the essay seminar on 16.05.

You should aim for about 2 pages in the length of the essay. The total time of reading the code and writing the review should take about 8 hours. Some of the topics have code bases far larger than it is possible to figure out with this amount of time. In this case, you should just write about what you found out in the allocated time. Don't worry about not being able to understand everything yet!