Particularly as a beginner, JavaScript programs are often written piecewise without a lot of planning. Or planned as part of page design, not on it's own. We may look at a web page or page design and think – it would be nice if when I did X, Y would happen and then write the code. However, as you move more toward writing applications than extending web pages, it becomes more and more important to plan and test your software rather than just sit down and code. There are a number of software development methodologies, and if you work for a company as a professional programmer, they will probably have one that you are required to use. Over time, you will likely find one that works well for you for personal projects as well. For personal projects, I tend to use an iterative method, where I plan out what I want, start with the minimum functional requirements, get those working and tested and then add additional features until I'm happy with it.

I've started training a successor service dog and one of the things I want to work on with him is alerting to sounds. The way I was taught to teach sound alerting is find a timer with an alarm that doesn't stop on its own and set it for a random, short length of time. You put it down and when it goes off, you don't react until your dog reacts, at which time you reward your dog and turn off the timer. Over time you shape the alert behavior into the desired behavior and then add additional sounds one by one. I thought that rather than having to mess with a timer, I'd write a JavaScript program to do this for me. As the first step in my planning process, I came up with a list of desired features.

Sound Alert Trainer Feature

• Start button
• Random timer
• 30 – 120 second time range
• On alarm, pops up an alert, sounds until button is pressed
• no need to hear the alarm
Advanced Features
• Configurable sounds
• Emergency Alert System Attention Signal
• Smoke Detector
• Any sound on the computer
• Sounds on the internet
• Cell phone ringtones
• Ability to change the time range

Lend Me an Ear: The Temperament, Selection and Training of the Hearing Ear Dog by Martha Hoffman
Hints on training hearing alerts from Fred Cisin
Hero – my new dog
Miss Pico – my current service dog