1 Overview: Given the overwhelming success of DukeDisc, President Rose has decided to take advantage of your talents by having you develop and market another software product. This one, called the Madison Minute Minder, keeps track of wireless telephone calls thus enabling people to stay within their monthly allotment of minutes.

The requirements and design are available on-line.

2 Grading of Programming Assignment 4: In order to receive a grade greater than 0 for PA4 your code must pass the in-lab tests on the due date and the hardcopy must be submitted on the due date.

However, "partial credit" will be awarded if you are able to get some components, but not all, working. In particular, you will receive a maximum grade of:

• 30 if your Duration class passes the in-lab tests;
• 60 if your DurationHistory class passes the in-lab tests; and
• 100 if your Minder class passes the in-lab tests.

3 Questions to Think About: In order to help you understand the topics being addressed in this assignment, you should consider the following questions:

1. The "get" methods in the DurationHistory class will fail if they are called at inappropriate times. Why does this happen? Why is this a bad design? How could you remedy this shortcoming using exception handling?
2. What issues arise when deciding whether a method should return an object or a pointer to an object?
3. What difficulties arise when a toString() method dynamically allocates memory for the string it returns? What other approaches might you use (e.g., passing in an empty string by reference, returning a local variable by value, etc...)?