Whirlwind Week

Well, it is Tuesday night and our deliverable is due on Thursday.

It is looking like we should be able to pull this together, but I am not sure.  I have had very good contact with two of the teams and my team, but I have not really heard that much from the other two teams at this point.  So, I am worried.  The teams that I have not heard that much from actually have more people than the ones who have not been, so it is a little weird.  I see Wiki activity and there are classes popping up in Perforce so I know they are working, but I wish I could just get a little more heads up so I am able to help serve them all better.

I do not know how good I am doing at this whole leader thing, but I have tried to should the group a good level of visibility of what is going on.  I have tried to be accommodating to others, and entertain ideas, even when the voice in the back of my head says, we are creeping slowly more behind.

So, we will see, but this class in general has been a lot of stress than I thought it would be.  I have a Studio deliverable due in three weeks now, and I am solely in charge of migrating over 17,000 web files to a database....  I am more stressed over coding a game of Tetris with it split up over 20 or so people.  Makes you think and what not.  Hopefully, I am being a good leader of the group, but time will tell.

I have learned one thing really important though.... there is nothing wrong with being a worker bee.

Note to self, try not to always volunteer.

Too Much Tetris....

Well today, I spent a lot of time gathering requirements and a list of features for our Tetris game.  I forgot how bad I was in Tertis because it took me a while to doo all of the little nifty tricks like getting four rows at once.  It also took me forever to get a row of one on level 10.... can you actually win at Tetris?  

I looked at the game on free Tertis and tried to gather all of the requirements and features out of it.  So far, I think we did a pretty good job as a team on it.  We have a good description, a listing of shapes , the scoring equations, and a few other things....  so overall it looks pretty good.

Finishing things up and New Beginnings

So, since I last posted we were able to finish up the Final project.  I was pretty sure that it would not come down to the wire and that we would be done a day or so before, but I ended up making a bobo, and needless to say we finished on Friday at around 4:00 or so.

So, that was no fun... as the other team gave our group a set of tests that we had to get up and running for it.  Most of them passed, but you could tell from a few that we both did certain areas of the design differently.  It worked just as nicely and we submitted documentation on it.  We added two dummy nodes for the head and tail of the design.  Those causes some of the tests to fail so we reworked a few things.  It was for the same functionality though.  So, it was kind of a false positive.  Bo and I helped to fix them and we ran into a lot of those.  In the end though it is complete, and I am on to the next one.

I have sent out a few posts to get the communication going and we have people talking which is good.  We will try to send a few more tonight.   Hopefully it will all come together by the middle of the week.

 

Posting Testing again

Well, I can swear that I posted on the 13th... but whatever.  I think blogger ate my entry... so it must not like me vary much....

So to recap for three days, I have been doing a lot of unit tests for most of my methods.   On Monday, I finished the unit tests promised, which were the ones for the get, the print method, and I think one of the insert methods.  I do not remember any major hurdles with them.  I also attended the group meeting and we gave out roles to the group.  All of the work was pretty straightforward, and it was just a matter of time to get them to all work with the different test cases.

Tuesday, was my birthday, so I did not do any project work... as I had did a lot.

Today, I chipped in again and did the unit testing for the remove and removeAt methods.  I got them and the other addToEnd method up and working.  They have fairly lengthy test cases which is good too.  I am really glad that I did, because I forgot to test the remove when there is only one node, so I did and updated some of the implementation for it.  While doing do, I forgot to increment the counter down by one... so that could have lead to some fun bugs.  My tests caught it though, which was great.  Overall though, the implementation was fairly straightforward.

In theory we are done now, but we still need tests for two methods.  After that, we will review to the team.

Unit Testing again....

So today, I mainly finished up some of my part for this assignment.  I have done a bit of it already, and I think it is right, so we will see.  Today, we had a meeting and assigned the rest of the parts, so I am mainly on support which is good/  I am excited as I have to due a lot of other things in the time being.

Today, I had the joy of unit testing again which was good, I guess.  I think I tested all of my methods and I caught a lot of my little bugs.  The main one had to due with the end of index, since an array starts at zero, but the node count starts at one... so that one stopped the train for a bit.  Overall though it went well.  I was able to piece things together and mover forward.  I wrote about five or so tests, and I think I did a pretty good job on them so we will see.

We are flying on this project, and the good news is that the other team things they will be able to implement ours fairly easily.  Or at least the HashMap which is very exciting.  It is a bit of a leap of faith to trust someone else with something like that, but I think it will be a good learning experience.

More Coding....

So, today I was able to do a basic implementation of both get methods.  One I was able to test well, and wrote a test case for.  The other, I did not test so thoroughly yet, as I got pulled away.  However though, I think we are were we should be at Wednesday, so that is really nice.

So, it is getting done, and I have had time free this weekend to work on it, which was nice, but I have done a lot on it, so I think I am going to take it easy for a bit.

I will probably finish up what I have done so far, as I have to write a couple of test cases for some of my methods, and then pass things off for a bit.

Recap of the Past Two Days

Well, this weekend has been a little crazy for me... I have put a lot of work in, but I have not quite got a chance to blog about it quite yet, so I thought I would blog now.

On Friday, I helped to finished the design portion of design.   I made and completed a test specification and I also went around and edited some things for grammar.  So I hopped from section to section.  I also helped to finalize the  sequence and class diagrams to give to the other group.  so it was a busy Friday.  This class has been eating a bunch of my time so at around 7:00 or so, I was content with the design and was ready to move to other classes.  It has surprisingly been a lot of work keeping o top of communication and what not.  So, we were ready at the end of the night, but I remembered that I forgot to blog about it...

So, I intended to blog on Saturday night.  On Saturday morning, I was able to start Team D's implementation.  I created both projects, normal and test.  I also began coding.  I was able to code a working implementation of one of there two classes, Node, with a test case.  I also started on building an the adding methods for the Manager class, figuring, I am going to need to add, before I can test the get method, that the user wants.

So, I was going to blog too, but it ended up I had a surprise birthday party yesterday.... so I put blogging on the back-burner until now...  So now I have to get caught up again, but I feel that we are doing well.

Pictures and specifications...

I really wish that assignments were first assigned a day or so before class...  I find myself getting very worked up on the smallest things, only to realize that it was not a big deal, for example this week has been very busy for me as we moved at work.  The movers did not come until 10:30, I had been there till 7:00, and it looks like I will have to come back tomorrow.  Oh joy...  but this week I was focusing to much on one deliverable to the other team, that I think in a bit I lost track of the design of the project.  We had two really good ideas, and without the time constraints it would have been really nice to go back and forth on them, but it took as a bit to get those designs, to see if they would be feasible for the other team, so by the time our big debate was, I was more worried about making a class diagram and a test spec for a design, instead of creating the best solution.  Still time constraints are an reality in life...

Today, I only had a couple of hours but I made two more diagrams, fixed my class diagram, completed the section on demos, reviewed some things and hopefully drafted a contingency plan that could help us if need be,  I think it will be a good compromise.

So, tomorrow test cases, and then the future project.

Working through things...

Today was a little stressful in general.  I am moving offices at work and in charge of around 12 other people moving, so today I went from 7:00 to 5:30 straight tying up loose ends.  We are still somewhat deciding what to do our design on, which is a little sure, but I think we will have a finalized plan today, which should be good.  Bo raised some good concerns with the design.    Bo, did have some concerns about the work we were giving the other group, which was also good, so I sent it to the professor.  We will say we he has to say on it.  Personally, I like both his and Amber's and I think they each have advantages to them, but we are getting late in the game to be comparing designs.  I am running out of time this week and I want to be fair to my group on this, and deliver what I promised / be available to deliver more

Right now though we are moving slowly but surely to the end.  As a backup plan, I probably should do another class diagram tonight,  but it does not look like that is going to happen.  So we will move on.  Hopefully tomorrow, I  will be a little better and will be able to crank out some diagrams before class.

My hope is that we decide today and move forward in one direction.  

Meeting today - Design

So, today we met and we finally have a design, we are going to go with Amber's for now.  I feel a lot better about it because I was able to make a demo of the HashMap for myself today, and with an online aid, it only took me about an hour or so to do.  So, it was good to run a prototype of it and see it work in action.  To be fair, I did not do the delete or find value methods, but I was able to duplicate most of the rest, which was good.

So, we had the meeting and pounded out all of the responsibilities, so we are getting there.  Tomorrow I have to make a class diagram and another picture appear, so it will be fun, but we will get there.

Finishing my design, group meeting.

I finished my design today, which was a good thing.  The major concept is to use layers.  The Bucket is the top layer and is in charge of adding and removing bucket nodes, as will s containing references to all of the bucket nodes.  It acts as the facade that the user interacts with.  

The BucketNode is in charge of adding and removing nodes, knowing its name, and to know what ItemNodes that it holds.  

The item node is in charge of knowing its name and which bucket it belongs to.  It also has a link to the next bucketNode that has that item and the previous node that has that Item.  To find a listing of which buckets contain an itemNode, the itemNodes just talk to themselves and return the information to the bucket.  So, the bucket only has to worry about what is in it.

So there is a picture too...

We also had a group meeting about design, and got into one of those good design arguments, so I think it will really help.  There were other designs that are far better than mine.  Since we have to create our own data-structures it really complicates them so we are not sure if we want the group coding it to hate us or not.  I am worried about a traffic of questions... so we will see...

We are going to try some prototypes and tracers and see if it is a good option or not.  If not, we may go with a design that has less performance, but that will save us time as it will be easier to explain and hopefully there will be less questions...

Choices....  

Thinking about designing

Today, I was mainly focusing on my reflection for Project 1 and on working on my other class... there was also the Super Bowl and a retreat event to go to so it was a busy day.

In the back of my head though I have been thinking about the architecture of the bucket problem though.  I have not sent out a design out to the group, but I am thinking of having there be a class that job is to maintain the lists of the buckets, it will be in charge of adding new buckets, with a factory class, and removing buckets.  It will also be responsible of knowing what is in all the buckets.  Then each bucket will be a class that is in charge of knowing what nodes it contains, and will be able to add or remove nodes.  The nodes will then also be a class which simply knows its next and previous if there are any.  All of the classes will hide behind interfaces, and will be Impl classes.

I think that would help as I do not think we can use data structures for this one... so we will see how it all works out as I have to look at the requirements again.  the theory is that there would be layers, with each layer responsible for a different problem, and the layer above not knowing anything about the happenings of what is below.  We will see how it works in practice.

Project 2

Today marks the start of my second project and it is already going well.  Bo has sent us a design and it looks pretty good.  To be fair to everyone I think we are going to give the rest of the weekend for everyone to put in there designs.  I have sent out a planning email so it looks like we are going to try to meet on Monday and work through everything.

Hopefully, we will be able to pick a design or combine and find the design that we like best.

Finished Touches

Today,I put the finishing touches on the project.  I made sure that everyone's tests were there from the refactoring before, and I added some conditions that I thought where not covered in some test cases.  So we should be good and ready to go forth now.

Everything is submitted and finalized in Perforce.  I sent off the Leader Email too, tonight, and I was really pleased at how this assignment went.  For the most part our plan worked well.  We stayed off of each others toes until we had to merge it all together.

So everything should be up and working.  Oh, and we have our first meeting for the next one planned, too... so we are just coasting through.

This one was a little less stressful on my end because everything was in on time and correct.  So, the hope is we keep getting better.  On to the next assignment... I do not mind being in charge of communication, but I would rather not lead this one.  Sometimes it is nice to be the worker bee...

Refactoring

Today, I finished refactoring all of the tests for the group, so we should be good and ready to go.  It was a little bit of a pain as there were a lot of tests that just would not work if they were copied and pasted.  So, I ended up having to make a new test project and select the classes that I wanted.  Maybe a little over the top, but it worked.  I am glad though it is all in one project...

I also separated my bug from the code and gave a message explaining why I thought it was a bug, based on the code.  I am fairly confident in that it is a bug, but after the lecture, I am a little nervous, and might take it out...  we will see how it all works out.

So, I am tired and I have to wake up at 6:00 tomorrow, so I am going to blog more later.

We are pretty much done though and I am ready for the next one...

Code Review and Reporting

Today, I was happy to see that everyone came through.  That was great, so my biggest worry is out of the way, so instead of possible helping others, I was instead able to spend my time doing a code review for the group.  


I did a code review of everyone work and it seems like we are all on track.  There are a few areas for improvement here and there, but overall everyone did a really good job.  Most of the problems, appeared to be untested conditions.  Since we all got them done early, we can also address these areas, and get better as a team, which is a blessing in itself too.  


It was actually a lot of work to pace through all of the code and figure out how everything worked per say.  I give my group a lot of credit as some of them picked rather hard areas to focus on.  So, it took some time and I am tried now, but I am glad that I was able to do it.  

I made some comments and sent them off to the group.   I offered to help again tomorrow.  I am pretty sure that they will come through again with everything and I think we are in good shape to finish on schedule.