Chapter 12. More on the Home Inventory Project

In this chapter, we will take the home inventory project to a stage where it will be a useful, if limited, application program that will allow you to keep track of your possessions. Of course, this doesn't mean that we will have completely finished this project; it's rare for a software application to be finished in the sense that nothing more can be done to improve it. In fact, the usual way to tell when you're done working on a project is that you have run out of time and have to put it into service, not that it does everything that you would like it to do. In this way, the home inventory project is quite representative of programming projects in general.^[1]

^[1] In fact, there is an application development method called “Extreme Programming” that is primarily devoted to dealing with this problem. See Extreme Programming Explained by Kent Beck (Addison-Wesley, ISBN 0-201-61641-6) for an overview of this method.

We'll get right to our improvements as soon as we get through some definitions as well as the objectives of the chapter.