CSUMB Learning Journal

Q. List the 5 most important things that you learned in the course, and why you chose them. A. I think the 5 most important concepts I learned during this course were Agile development with BDD and TDD, Git version control, automated testing with JUnit and Selenium, Cloud Deployment with AWS, and service-oriented architecture. These concepts are very important because they all tie into the ability to be able to rapidly deliver reliable and scalable high quality software.

 Q.  Describe some of the differences between using an Agile process and using a Plan and Document (or Waterfall) process.   A. The primary different between Agile and a Plan and Document (Waterfall) process lies in how they approach requirements and execution of a project. Waterfall uses sequential phases that need to be fully completed before moving on to the next phase of the plan. This model makes it difficult to make changes later on. Agile works in much shorter cycles that iterate on themselves which allows the project requirements to change and grow as the product is incrementally refined into a final product. Waterfall makes a plan with comprehensive documentation (unaware of future complications) and Agile prioritizes putting together smaller pieces of the project while staying open to being able to adapt to an environment of smaller changes that might need to be made to the project. Plan and Document is more rigid while Agile is more flexible.

The most important thing I learned this week is about CaaS (Compute as a Service) and how it solves the messy and inefficient processes that came before it. Previously, teams managed their own "snowflake" machines, which were unique environments that wasted engineering effort on tasks like OS patching and manual scaling. CaaS provides a standardized platform where developers simply package their application in a container and declare its resource requirements. A central cluster manager then automates scheduling, resource allocation, and failure recovery for a large shared pool of hardware. This shift in strategy improves efficiency and reliability, which allows engineers to focus more time on building products instead of managing infrastructure.