Background

‘Green Guard’ is a garden maintenance company that is growing quickly. The company is struggling to keep track of all their equipment and have engaged you to develop a program to assist them with identifying when their equipment needs to be replaced.

‘Green Guard’ has three categories of equipment:

• Standard equipment (i.e. Rakes, Brooms and Shovels)

• Fuel powered equipment (i.e. Lawn Mowers, Chainsaws)

• Battery powered equipment (i.e. Edge Trimmers, Brush Cutters) 

The program will need to be able to manage:

• The display of common information about all equipment

• The display of information relevant to specific equipment categories

• When a piece of equipment needs to be replaced

It is recommended that you read through all the tasks before commencing work on your assessment.

This assessment consists of the creation of one abstract class and three inherited classes. You may wish to consider implementing and testing the abstract class and one of its inherited classes before implementing all classes. The Battery Powered Equipment class is most straightforward to implement.

Requirements

In terms of when equipment needs to be replaced, that depends on the type of equipment:

• Battery Powered Equipment needs to be replaced when the equipment warranty runs out using the following formula:

Replacement Year = Length of Warranty + Purchase Year

i.e. for a battery powered item with a warranty of 2 years purchased in 2022

Replacement Year = 2 + 2022

Replacement Year = 2024

• Fuel Powered Equipment needs to be replaced after being used for more than 500 days. The number of days that a piece of equipment is used in a year is approximated to determine when it should be replaced using the following formula:

Replacement Year = Maximum Days / Days Usage Per Year + Purchase Year

i.e. for a fuel powered item that is used approximately 100 days in a year purchased in 2022

Replacement Year = 500 / 100 + 2022

Replacement Year = 2027

• Standard equipment needs to be replaced a maximum of 7 years after it was purchased, but this is also dependent on the durability of the equipment. A durability factor is used to assist in determining the replacement date. The durability factor is a number between 0 and 1. The overall calculation of the replacement year is made using the following formula

Replacement Year = Maximum Lifespan * Durability Factor + Purchase Year

i.e. for a standard item with a durability of 0.6 purchased in 2022

Replacement Year = 5 * 0.6 + 2022

Replacement Year = 2025

Replacement years should always be rounded up

Tasks

Task 0 – Creation of NetBeans Project

As a starting point create a new NetBeans project and give it the name ‘ReplacementTest’. Your main class for the project should (by default) have the same name. The aim of this class is to enable testing to determine if all aspects of the program are working as expected. You can use it to run testing as you develop your project and also once it is complete.