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Test Move Method
00:00
So in the previous lesson, I kind of finished writing this big .move() method. So now it’s time to test it out. I will run the code and then I will have to make some animals.
00:21
and an instance of a Dog, and
00:31
an instance of a Barn that holds only one animal. Also an instance of a Field that holds ten animals. Okay, I have a Pig, a Dog, a Barn, and a Field all initialized, and now I should be able to move around and test out the new .move() function.
00:54
So the pig._location currently is None. If I print it, it’s going to tell us that it’s None
01:03
because we just initialized the pig, and it just lives in the void for now.
01:09 Now I’m going to move the pig. The pig is going to go to the barn.
01:17
I get as an output, Lizzy moved to the barn. Sounds good. Let’s see whether it actually happened. pig. In this call, ._location should point to the barn object. Great.
01:28
And from the other direction, if I say barn.animals, yes, I have a list that contains now one Pig object. That worked. What if I try to move the dog also into the barn? That shouldn’t work.
01:43
The barn in this case only has one space. So if I try to do dog.move() into the barn, then it tells me The barn is full. Let’s see if anything happened.
01:56
barn.animals still only contains the Pig, so that’s good. And dog._location is still None. So that’s great. Now, can I move the dog to the field?
02:11
That should work. That’s the same what we did earlier with the pig. Puppy moved to the field. dog._location points to the Field object. That’s great.
02:21
And the field object contains a Dog instance now. And now I want to move the sheep. No, the pig. I don’t have a sheep here. .move() to the field as well.
02:36
That should take it out of the barn and move it into the field. So the output says Lizzy moved to the field. That’s great. Now let’s look at pig._location.
02:49
It points to the Field object. That’s great. Now let’s see if the field has also been updated. field.animals contains two items, A Dog and the Pig instance.
03:00
Great, that’s a bit of testing, just a manual testing that I did right now. But it seems like the .move() method works like I expected it to.
03:11
Guess what? There is a bug in my .move() method after all. It’s a subtle logical bug that managed to escape my crude manual testing as you’ve just seen.
03:21 I only noticed the bug later on. That’s a good reminder that manual testing isn’t very reliable and that writing tests for your code that you can run repeatedly is a much better way to go.
03:32
Anyways, this bug won’t affect the functionality of my farm much, which is why you’ll continue to see this buggy version of .move() stick around in the upcoming lessons.
03:42
But that doesn’t mean you can’t go off on a side quest. Investigate my buggy .move() method, and propose a fix in the comments. I’ll redeem myself with a bugfix lesson just before the end of this course.
03:59
The interesting thing that you’re doing here is that you’re using some sort of an element of composition, I guess. This is called aggregation, because you’re not technically composing an object from another object. Well, I guess Animal has some sort of composition in there because we have a ._location that is going to be the Location object, and here we have in the FarmLocation attribute .animals, we see a form of aggregation where you’re adding Animal objects to an internal list of the FarmLocation object or its children.
04:35 Great. I’m going to clean up the comments here just to make this a bit cleaner. Do you want to print a message when I remove it? Not really. I’m just going to inform when it enters the location.
04:49
I think that should be enough. And that’s the .move() method. I think at this point we’ve done three methods, so I will remove this note as well. Good job.
05:02 Let’s take a look at the current implementation of your farm in the next lesson.
Martin Breuss RP Team on Dec. 22, 2023
Nice! You’re barking up the right tree @Luke Bam! :)
You can also check out the later lesson where I’ll identify the bug.
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Luke Bam on Dec. 20, 2023
I would like to have a go at identifying the bug, but it’s quite a challenge to know how to express it correctly!
I think the bug is related to the fact that the move method must modify both the animal instance attribute
self._locationand the farmlocation.animals list. It is possible for an animal to become ‘homeless’ from the perspective of the location.animals list as it is removed from the previous location list before checking if there is room in the new location. Despite this, the animalsself._locationattribute would still point to the previous location.Am I close? Apologies if I’m barking up the wrong tree!