Eco-Depot, name inspired by classmate Edward Meyer and his way with words, is not only our first work as a team of four, but is also our first attempt at using the “Java to the Web” language known as Wicket. Overall we were to take the Watt-Depot system and use part of it to construct a system which uses java to generate an HTML page which will report back a 24 hour map of carbon production from electricity production which is color scaled to high, medium, and low levels so that a user can find the least carbon productive time to use electricity. Wicket allows us to use the Java language we are accustomed to using in our Software Engineering class and apply it the web.
Working with a bigger team than last time was also introduced to use, and to make matters a little more complicated, the attendance for class this week was optional while Professor Johnson was away. This issue led to our first wall, the slow start up when not everyone is together. To my knowledge and experience the members of my group (myself included) can be thought of as more passive and considerate of others, unfortunately for this kind of project that can delay or slow down matters as each person would want to let the most stubborn of the group decide the standards at which to adhere to. After seeing that on the first day of meeting (which had us down one member) the second day we met I felt the need to try to take some point of leadership/direction just to get us rolling. This proved to help get things going at least and soon after we had our system ready and slowly started working.
My first experience being a team leader I found myself falling into several pit traps I didn’t think about immediately. First off I had come to the conclusion that our mail would be our most powerful tool (not getting phone numbers as a result), but I did not anticipate the unlikely issue that people would not read their mail. I had said in one of our fast to fast meeting that we should email updates to each other so we knew where we were at times but I found that updates came by surprise and only Kim who already is use to this form of communication from our last project was following with me. The conflict lead to issues with knowing what I could tread on and what I couldn’t and if not for the timing of the team could have cause more effort than necessary. The mailing issue has become a problem to this moment, as without the Hudson updates I wouldn’t have any idea what the other two members would be doing at the time.
The next issue occurred was the coding style of the two members I was not already familiar with. Daniel and Alan, while capable of coding, code in a slightly different style than I was prepared for and required reworking their code somewhat to get things to function smoothly, and I that keeping myself set to refactor and reorder was a good idea. At times I might have put too much faith in coding going smoothly and failed to check the Hudson and Hackystat installations, the two monitoring systems we use, which both missed small details in them. It was still good we got everything working though and I hope they are also checking on our work to make sure we didn’t leave anything out either.
But regardless of who did what and what got done I believe we accomplished the task. The program functions and it is a little bit more than minimum standard in terms of visuals. Hackystat provided us with the following ICU status points over the last week:
As you can see a lot of our work came flooding in at the end of the project. This pattern may be unhealthy but is also a sign of the difficult of working on a spread out schedule. With all the other classes a student has to take and each one producing their own deadline with no consideration of the other classes what tends to happen is that a student will plan to tackle things in large chunks, which would be a reason that our ICU statistics fall as such. I can’t say that applies to everyone, but for me this is definitely a point I would follow.
Version 1.0 of Eco-depot can be downloaded from the Google code site here. You can refer to the appropriate Wiki for your needs (whether developer or user).
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