cst 438: week 3

This week, I learned how to bridge the gap between building isolated components and managing a complex multi-developer system in our labs this week. 

I explored how system testing basically provides a final layer of defense by using Selenium to automate the browser and verify that our React frontend correctly handles end-to-end workflows with the Spring Boot API. I spent a lot of time implementing Git branching strategies, which highlighted that the best part of using Git is its ability to maintain a history and audit log where everyone (even contributors) have a full copy of the repo. While Git is excellent at tracking changes and providing an audit trail through commits and pull requests, I realized its primary limitation is that it only performs text merges. This means that even if a merge is technically successful without conflicts, it cannot detect logical errors or breaking changes where two independent code updates are technically correct syntax wise but functionally not working, which means we would need to keep an eye on the changes carefully. For me, this week reinforced that while Git manages the versioning of our source code, it is the combination of automated system tests and thorough code reviews that ensures the actual accuracy of the application that we're building.