Lab 8 RobotWar

SWEN221: Software Development
Lab Handout
The purpose of this lab is to explore some subtle aspects of encapsulation. In particular, a program
is given which appears (for the most part) to be properly encapsulated. However, there remain certain
ways in which code can break encapsulation. Your job is to harden the code base against such attacks.

1 RobotWar
A small software program, called Robot War, is provided which implements a battle arena in which
robot with artificial intelligence can compete against each other.
You can download the robotwar.jar from the lecture schedule on the course home page. You
should begin by running the software and getting a feel for how it works. Figure 1 shows a screenshot
from RobotWar.
2 What to do
You should find that a number of the invalid tests are failing. Your job is to harden the robot war
code base against the attempts to break encapsulation embodied in the invalid tests. Please note
that just changing the test code is insufficient for this lab. Rather, you instead need to ensure
certain objects do not give away as much information as they currently are.
Submission
Your lab solution should be submitted electronically via the online submission system, linked from
the course homepage. The required files are:
robotwar/core/Robot.java
robotwar/core/Battle.java
robotwar/core/Action.java
robotwar/util/Position.java
robotwar/actions/Shoot.java
robotwar/actions/Move.java
robotwar/robots/PatrolBot.java
1
Figure 1: A screenshot from the robot war game.
You must ensure your submission meets the following requirements (which are needed for the
automatic marking script):
1. Your submission is packaged into a jar file, including the source code. Note, the jar
file does not need to be executable. See the following Eclipse tutorials for more on this:
http://ecs.victoria.ac.nz/Support/TechNoteEclipseTutorials
2. The names of all classes, methods and packages remain unchanged. That is, you
may add new classes and/or new methods and you may modify the body of existing methods.
However, you may not change the name of any existing class, method or package. This is to
ensure the automatic marking script can test your code.
3. All JUnit test files supplied for the assignment remain unchanged. Specifically, you
cannot alter the way in which your code is tested as the marking script relies on this. This does
not prohibit you from adding new tests, as you can still create additional JUnit test files. This
is to ensure the automatic marking script can test your code.
4. You have removed any debugging code that produces output, or otherwise affects
the computation. This ensures the output seen by the automatic marking script does not
include spurious information.
Note: Failure to meet these requirements could result in your submission being reject by the submission system and/or zero marks being awarded.
2