Last week I finished the first version of my model and I’m pretty pleased with how it works so far.
There are twp issues worth noting though. JUnit was and is invaluable in developing the model but since my model uses a lot of random numbers it can be tricky to write the assert cases since you don’t know what the outcome of a particular method might be. To get around this, I’ve created dummy input files with binary (0 or 1) input data. Ordinarily these values would be a probability between 0 and 1 but with the test input, I know definitely what the model is doing at any stage.
The other one is that the model outputs its results to a text file as it goes along. This makes it kind of tricky to write a JUnit test. Perhaps there is some way of doing this but for the moment I just output everything to a file and look at it manually to see if the data makes sense.
PS In case anyone’s wondering about the version numbers. V0.1 was a dummy version, just playing around with Repast and Eclipse. V0.2 was a more serious attempt and had a few interesting features liking reading in input from a proper database (well Access…). I’ve tried to map out the version numbers so that they’ll make some sense, at least in hindsight. For the moment I’m planning on adding features to the basic model for the 0.3x releases. I think V0.4 will introduce the all of the remaining agents, though they may not be fully implemented.
