Project Status
This week was the final week in the revised schedule for Iteration 1.
Major development efforts continued throughout the week by most
members of the team. There was also a meeting on Tuesday to discuss
some requirements issues with the sponsors. During this meeting a
regular meeting time of 4 pm. on Tuesdays was established. Many of the
features that were scheduled for Iteration 1 were completed and ready
to be rolled out. This includes the key features of the login system
for students, email functionality for students, (including
notification and confirmation emails – as well as confirmation emails
for employers), and most form related features. These features will be
ready for demonstration this weekend and we will be focusing on
finishing the remainder of our Iteration 1 goals and beginning the
process of identifying those features which should be implemented in
Iteration 2. These features can be discussed along with any changes to
the Iteration 1 features in the Tuesday meeting following this week.
Individual Tasks and Accomplishments
- Patrick - began work on a requirements document
- Everyone - developed code for their respective features (see Bugzilla for details)
Issues to Resolve
- Our major issue has simply been time and the quality of the existing project’s code. We have found many instances where code is copy-pasted, or where there exists a great opportunity for reuse that is ignored. In addition, a complete lack of code documentation is slowing the process. Some refactoring has been necessary and has lead to delays due to the necessity of testing the changes. We anticipate these issues will lessen as our experience with the system grows and the amount of code that is our own increases.
- The database schema from the previous project did not make use of normalization. We are currently evaluating whether or not making changes to the existing schema will be worth it, as they may make future development easier and would certainly optimize the database, but would require significant changes to the existing code and regression testing as well.
- We have yet to develop a sophisticated methodology for testing. We are currently evaluating our options and will make a decision based on how sophisticated we want our testing, as well as what tools if any we will use.
Short Plan for Next Week
- Our plan for next week is to identify Iteration 2 goals along with the sponsors.
- We will also be finishing any Iteration 1 features that were not completed, and making changes based on sponsor feedback.