screenshot of the login page
NEW FEATURES OF DUE DATES 2.0
The main new feature of Due Dates version 2.o is that is a legit web application, created through Wicket. The other features include a login in page that verifies users from an XML file, a result page that dynamically updates, sorts, and filters your borrowed items, and an alerts page that can schedule email notifications when items are due soon. Its a pretty cool system that is also makes use of CSS, so it looks good to the user. Our group was able to implement all of these features into the system. However, we did not add any extra functionalities to the application.
TEAM DEVELOPMENT
I really enjoyed being a part of a three-person development team. I found that overall, more was getting done with three people always working, rather than just one or two. In the past I've gone weeks without having to do an svn update, but with this project I was constantly updating and committing code. I liked the fact that whenever I went to work on Due Dates, there was usually some new code for me to check out. It was a much more efficient system working together than I've experienced in the past.
Communication was a big plus for our team. We all met a few times a week to do some planning, reporting, and programming. Right off the bat we decided what everyone on the team was going to more or less do, and we got on it. We delegated tasks to everyone through Google project hosting's issue manager. To see what tasks I worked on, view my issue log. One of the main things I enjoyed about working on Due Dates 2.0 was the fact that there were a bunch of different and unique things to do. I personally was excited to work on the CSS styles for the web app, as well as creating the XML configuration manager, since we've never done that sort of thing before. Everyone was able to bring their own skills together for this project and it worked nicely.
When we weren't meeting in person, we were meeting online, talking via instant messages. I did this a lot with the other team members and it worked really well for throwing bugged code back and forth. However, meeting in person was definitely needed for a project like this and it really helped our overall system develop. I remember on the first day we met as a team, Aric had a great idea of planning out exactly what general classes and methods we were going to have so we could all work on things even if something the code relied on was not implemented yet. This worked well when creating the Wicket classes for instance.
DEVELOPMENT PROCESS
If I could sum up the development process of Due Dates in one word I would say it was 'smooth.' For most of the time spent on development, I did not feel stressed at all. This was partly because I was working regularly, as were my teammates. Since we were committing often, we did not have much that was left to do last minute.
DEVELOPMENT PROBLEMS
The most frustrating and challenging problem I had during the entire development process happened the night before Due Dates 2.0 was set to be finished. I had been working on the overall test suite for the system and I got stuck on testing the ResultPage class which displays a users borrowed items to screen. In testing the class, I was simply trying to update the page with some borrowed items that the test user had. It is a simple test to run manually through the web interface, and it works every time no matter what. However, when running it in a test case, it would never work. The dataview was never created. I consulted my teammates about this, as well as other students and nobody could figure it out. I spent most of my night trying to debug this simple test and wasn't able to figure it out. However, in trying to fix it, I came upon several other possible bugs in the system.
I attribute most of the churn on the last night to this bug, as I re-coded a lot of things in hope that it would fix.
Other than this bug, I didn't run into a lot of problems over the last two weeks. Our group process ran smoothly and we only had minor problems which were fixed quickly. The only thing worth mentioning was the first time I got an update conflict on SVN. This was my first time dealing with a conflict and it really confused me. I didn't know what was what, but eventually I figured it out and it was no problem after that.
SOFTWARE ICU STATISTICS
The overall status of our project reflects in our HackyStat statistics, which are nearly all in the green:
Our development time as a group was consistent, and our commits, builds, and tests were also consistent. Our coverage trend was always going up and we ended with 96% method coverage. The only thing that got messed up was the churn, which was great until the last night (when I was trying to figure out the test bug). However, the overall churn trend is more or less consistently low.
Our development trends were somewhat accurate in representing each members participation.
development time graph
As it shows here, I have the least amount of development time of everyone in the group and Mari has the most. Aric is right in the middle. Everyone seems to have worked nearly every day during this project which is good. What is flawed in this graph is the time spent out of eclipse. This includes working on wikis and for me especially, working in dreamweaver. In addition, when looking at other trends the data seems to change:
commit data
Here it shows that I have the most commits while Mari has the least. Aric's right there in the middle again. This is true of system builds as well:
build data
Surprisingly though, Aric and Mari ended up with the exact same amount of builds. I thought that was pretty cool.
It was good having the Software ICU monitoring our group process and system health. I can see a real change in how I work on stuff now compared to 5 months ago. I like to work regularly instead of working just a day here and a day there.
FINAL THOUGHTS
As a software developer I would like to continue creating things in the same way I have with Due Dates 2.0. All the software engineering tools available really aid in creating robust systems. If only I had known about SVN or JUnit before, my code would have been better. Overall, I think creating this web application shows how I have grown as a software engineer. I would not have been able to do such a thing before. Although there are many, many things that can be improved on our version 2.0, I think it turned out quite well for the time we had. I hope to add to it one day.
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1 comments:
Yeah, this is a good one!
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