and max heap the former strategy enforces that the value of parent node is less than that of each of its childrenthe latter enforces that the value of the parent is greater than that of each of its children when you come across heap and you are not told what strategy it enforces you should assume that it uses the min-heap strategy if the heap can be configured otherwisee to use max-heap then this will often require you to state this explicitly the heap abides progressively to strategy during the invocation of the insertionand deletion algorithms the cost of such policy is that upon each insertion and deletion we invoke algorithms that have logarithmic run time complexities while the cost of maintaining the strategy might not seem overly expensive it does still come at price we will also have to factor in the cost of dynamic array expansion at some stage this will occur if the number of items within the heap outgrows the space allocated in the heap' backing array it may be in your best interest to research good initial starting size for your heap array this will assist in minimising the impact of dynamic array resizing