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Excerpt: Generic Stack Implementation

Implementation approach: The Stack was implemented using a singly linked list as the underlying data structure, with a private inner Node class holding a generic data field and a reference to the next node. This approach achieves O(1) time complexity for push, pop, and peek operations — superior to an array-based implementation which requires O(n) resizing when capacity is exceeded. The use of Java generics (<T>) ensures type safety at compile time, preventing ClassCastException errors at runtime and conforming to the Collections Framework design pattern established in Java 5.

Exception handling: The pop() and peek() methods throw a custom EmptyStackException (extending RuntimeException) when called on an empty stack, rather than returning null — a design choice that follows the Fail-Fast principle recommended in Effective Java (Bloch, 2018). The isEmpty() guard method allows callers to check state before operating, providing two complementary approaches to safe stack usage. All edge cases — popping from an empty stack, peeking at a single-element stack, and type integrity across mixed-use scenarios — were verified through eight JUnit 5 test cases achieving 100% branch coverage as measured by JaCoCo.