It is now almost four O'clock in the morning and I am still waiting in front of my computer half asleep. Trouble seems to strike at the most inconvenient time these days, but I guess anytime trouble hits it becomes an inconvenient time.
Its been a little over two hours since my internet cut out on me, disconnected from my group and unable to contribute anymore progress into the overall system. Lets recap this previous week and hopefully by the end of this textedit post the internet will be back up.
This project is finally coming to an end. We started off with 3 applications in mind, we've only seen the completion of 2. Not the best, but considering the amount of time spent in refining the other applications we've accomplished plenty in the two months we were given.
This past week we've been scrambling quite a bit, what should have been a week to do finishing touches on our public release of the Monitor application and the next version of the Visualization application met with some road blocks.
In our last weekly meeting we were given comments on a code review that Professor Johnson did… and it was a disaster. There were many comments that issues presented in the meeting that really opened our eyes to the messy code that we have presented.
The first issue was our previous wiki pages. We had slapped together wikis as a placeholder using base from our previous coding assignments. I had use my groups Developers Guide from a previous semester and I had thought all the references to to old project was removed, but Professor Johnson managed to find some. I had forgotten to remove all the links that lead back to the wrong project page.
This week we've had a complete overhaul on the wikis based on the suggestions by Robert and Professor Johnson. It should now be comprehensive and informative enough for both users and developers each on their on level.
The second issue discussed was a package we were using in our code. This semester isn't the first time we are working with Wattdepot. In a previous semester we had written a command line interface for users to quickly query some data based on preset commands. When we first started our project we had though this old code would be useful and save time, so we reused it turning it into a "Command" package. Turns out that instead of directly accessing Wattdepot with all the nice methods presented to us by Robert, we were using this faux command line on top of it and having to do all this extra work before we actually did any calls. This was very inefficient and from a outside developer's standpoint almost impossible to understand.
This week, we did a total overhaul and re-factored the code. We looked at the command methods took what we needed and scarped the rest. Now completely gone is the Command package, each application now only uses what it needs to rather than importing the entire package.
Other than the code clean up, comments, and documentation for the release, we were able to squeeze in some extra enhancements to the Monitor application.
Last week I talked about going portable, so we've added in a proof of concept parameterized link for users to send to others.
Although there are issues with it that I would like to see get fixed in the future, it is a very neat feature to have and I believe it will be useful to users.
No comments:
Post a Comment