Development

This is the main section of the report. It should deal with your activities as you develop whatever program is required by the particular exercise. Development involves the following general kinds of activity:

• Coding: This is composing new C code.
• Compilation: This is using the compiler to translate the C code you have composed - the source code - into the executable form that the CPU could directly execute.
• Execution: This is executing the program, and providing suitable test data, to assess whether, or to what extent, it behaves as required. It will generally be up to you to formulate satisfactory test cases. It is particularly important to try to test the limits of correct operation - to test the program with extreme or exceptional input data, to assess whether it maintains correct behaviour in these cases. For example, if something is supposed to work over a certain range of numbers, make sure you test it at the limits of this range. If something is supposed to deal in a certain way with "illegal" input data, then actually test it on "illegal" input data to check this.

It is unknown for development of any significant program to just go straight through these three phases one single time. Problems will invariably arise which mean that you must cycle back through these phases, possibly many many times, before a satisfactory version of the program is completed. Thus it is not appropriate for the Development section of the report to be simply divided into subsections for these distinct activities. Instead, it should be divided into subsections according to the successive problem(s) you find yourself dealing with.

Thus, each subsection should try to clearly state a problem you are currently trying to solve, and your ultimate solution (if any!). A problem might be "Code an initial version of the program", or "Get rid of a compiler error message saying 'Unrecognised Symbol at Line 5' ", or "Test whether the variable x is being correctly updated" or whatever.

A problem will often be of the form that something is not behaving as you expected. In such cases try to be as clear as you can about what you expected and what actually happened. Distinguish between problems that are "compile-time" - i.e. they are indicated by some message from the compiler - and those that are "run-time" - i.e. they are manifested only when the program is executed.

The Development section must include the evolving text(s) of your program. As you make significant changes or additions to the program, you should include the new program text - possibly in whole, or possibly just those parts that have changed, whichever you judge is more appropriate.