3.4 Summary

This chapter introduced the first project, the Data Acquisition Base Application. This application extracts data from a CSV file with a complex structure, creating four separate series of data points from a single file.

To make the application complete, we included a command-line interface and logging. This will make sure the application behaves well in a controlled production environment.

An important part of the process is designing an application that can be extended to handle data from a variety of sources and in a variety of formats. The base application contains modules with very small implementations that serve as a foundation for making subsequent extensions.

Perhaps the most difficult part of this project is creating a suite of acceptance tests to describe the proper behavior. It’s common for developers to compare the volume of test code with the application code and claim testing is taking up ”too much” of their time.

Pragmatically, a program...