Checkpoint Reached: Milestone Pitstop

Its been four weeks since we started the Wattdepot apps project and we are now entering the first of our monthly milestones. At the end of each milestone the groups will present on their progress and it is decided of the project is completed or will be continued.

So the first deadline of February 9th approaches and there have been major modifications to our original plans.

When we first started the project, I felt that we would have all three items : the visualizer, browser, and monitor; completed by the time the milestone came, but this is not the case. Within the first week of our project we were able to get the basic visualizer up and I thought that although with some minor adjustments we were done with it, but that project ended up evolving the encompass the entirety of the milestone.

We are very far from our original basic visualizer and the current version. There are many enhancements and this is the one thing that is "almost" complete, there are a few issues that we will be updating in the future, while all the other projects were pushed back to future mile stones.

I have come to realize now that this one project that are currently one, to refine it to a professional quality may be at least one or two more milestones, but that may have been the original intention.

In the last week we have made many strides since our previous meeting. Not only was it a busy school week for the group members but it was also a super bowl weekend, much which have hindered some of our work time, but we managed to pull through with a decent amount of effort and work put into polishing up the "almost" final version of the visualizer.

While the others worked on refining the code and adding last minute touches, and added in the error checking to prevent and warn users when they are using the product incorrectly. I've also allowed users to query both types of data (calculated and sensor) in this new version. As a group we were able to implement a cancel button to allow users to cancel queries if they wished to. Other than those two big changes most of the time was used to polish up the remainder of the code and get the documentation and wikiPages ready for a distribution onto the public servers.

The one item that we were not able to implement was allow the comparison between multiple sources on the same graph or allow users to view sub-sources of a large source. We hope to be able to complete these features in the future, but for now in the upcoming milestone, I believe we plan to focus our attention on completing the next piece of our three planned applications for wattdepot, the browser. We already have a base page up and it is half working, so we hope to be able to complete it within the week and use the remaining time refining and making enhancements like we've done in the previous milestone.

As far as group work is going, for the most part it has been going smoothly, each member is contributing to the overall goal, although there are still those times were we get into disagreements. We have no plans to split up and work on a different project for the next milestone so hopefully it will go as planned.

One down, three to go!