The design and implementation of a web application for visualizing chemical structures and information using test driven development

Osunrinde, Dayo J. (2017) The design and implementation of a web application for visualizing chemical structures and information using test driven development. Masters thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

[English] PDF - Accepted Version Available under License - The author retains copyright ownership and moral rights in this thesis. Neither the thesis nor substantial extracts from it may be printed or otherwise reproduced without the author's permission. Download (3MB)

Abstract

This research examined the use of Test-Driven Development (TDD) for the creation of a web application to visualize chemical structures. To date, TDD has mainly been applied to develop traditional software systems. The study however described the novel application of TDD to the development of a high-quality scientific web application using Django, Python 3, Selenium, HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, JSmol and the RESTful API. With TDD, automated tests are written first. These tests drive the design of the software towards an extensible application that easily accommodate changes and updates. Presented in this thesis is the test driven design, analysis and implementation of the visualization application as well as the tests and verification results. The study concluded that the application of TDD to scientific web application development can lead to a better design, high-quality production code, and easier integration of changes and new requirements. However, the research made no claim that TDD is a magic wand that solves all software problems. Rather, the approach has the prospect of ensuring high-quality web applications as it can be a bit tedious.

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