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IS480 Team wiki: 2008T1G5 Asteriex

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Highlights of our Journey

Problems we've faced along the way, Significant road-blocks overcome , Milestones Achieved etc.

The Good Stuff

1) Every single niche in the departments we are working with have been explored in great great detail and it has paid off in getting our requirements sorted out even though it took alot longer than we expected.

2) All of the constituent bodies and OSL have agreed to use the system that we will create - even one not agreeing would have reduced the impact and value add of the project significantly by having a manula process running concurrently taking away some of the good things our project brought about for users

3) some depratments were forced to look at and clarify how things are done and to fill gaps in processes and information - we are obliged to refrain from giving exmaples of this since it would be unprofessional on our part to disclose our stakeholders' shortcomings.

4) The Calendar control that nearly killed - The logic was finlly figured out.


The Not-so-good Stuff

1) A few big changes in process coming to light only rather late in the day - the problem with the priority rules, asset adding, transfering processes... etc. - Sadly this happened the week after we had spent the immediate preceeding weekend scrutinizing volumes of data and working out the logic of the priority rules

2) One team member out sick for 4 weeks - first 3 weeks of the term affected

3) 2 laptops of the 3 had problems during week 5 and 6 - one finally required re-formatting and the the other had to be euthanized and a new laptop purchsed.

4) 15th Oct 2008 - still waiting for purchase of reporting tool and server specs

5) We had a significant amount of trouble setting up the environments for Apache and PHP - it took us quite a few hours to eventually get all 3 laptops up and running.

6) Learning everything of php/sql and everything else we need to in order to make our project work the way we want it to is taking more time and effort than we estimated.

Week Thirteen

Development going on.... The calendar control is slowly taking shape - we have hopes that it will acually work this week... the reporting tool is starting to look good and possibly more usable than what it initially appreared to be...

The Data is finally quite ready for migration... We plan to conduct UAT next week... *fingers crossed - the moment of truth approaches*

Week Twelve

Spent the week looking at the reporting tool that we finally managed to get our hands on, cleaning up data in preparation for migrating to the new database and developing the remaining functionality. The calendar control is still something that we are unable to figure out...


Week Eleven

And so its the end of week 11 ... and why do we sound so chilled out? well whats the point of stressing out right ? :P

on a more serious note... we are progressing well though cleaning up the data is proving to a rather herculean task. Our main functionality is mostly ready with a few adjustments to be made and some debugging to do

We've signed up for a presentation slot so now we have a more tangible deadline to work towards

Our clients - the SA are happy with the functionality we have shown them so far and are eager to see more which is encouraging. We are also slowly starting to make preparations for the final presentation and to put together the documentation that is required for the course as well as for the clients. Ofcourse with course work also, presentations and reports piling up and final exams drawing near the preasure is certainly on high... but We Will Survive... Bring on week 12!! :)

Week Ten

Progress looks good so far and we are getting hopeful. Our Asset functionality is almost done and working fine... the loane functionality if also making slow but acceptable progresss...

We ran into a few roadblocks last week while trying to code all of our functionality using OO. Eventually we decided on combining methodology so that some of our modules are now coded in sequence - we couldnt really come up with a well worked out ratinale for this except that it made sense that way - Prof agrees with us so we are not overly concerned with the implications of doing this anymore.

We are meeting the folk from SA this week to give them a demo of wht we've got and to work out progress and to sort out other issues that might affect us during the weeks to come.

Also going back to OSL for more clarification after cleaning up some of the massive sets of data they gave us so as to ensure that we've got our logic worked out just right...

We intend to have a marathon FYP run this weekend since its a long weekend and we did get much more work done by working at one of our homes than meeting in school... :)


Week Nine

Wednesday 15th Oct

Fullscale development has finally started. All three of us are now into getting out as many of the funcitons as possible within this and the next week. Progress is slow since 2 of us still have to get used to PHP but thankfully its not a language that is hard to learn. We hope to be able to have all our functionality up within the next 3 weeks.

The meeting with our Supervisor this week was also more or less centered around getting out code... so we can spend the next meeting testing things out and debugging if needed

Week Eight

After a gruelling week fo midterms and project due it was time to get back to FYP-ing again. This week was psent mostly on trying to figure out ho out progress was, where we were lagging and how to catch up. This resulted in us approaching the development phase more aggressively and closing out the analysis and design phases with the exception of a few issues on which we are waiting client response i.e. the box, server specs etc.

The mid term review proved helpful in getting us to focus on what we had completed and how we should/could hope to proceed. We reviwed out project plan and amended it somewhat to reflect the reality of the project as opposed to our initial plans. We believe we are able to complete the project on schedule!

Week Six

This week Team Asterix spent an entire weekend disecting and scrutinizing thousands of pages of client data. While the process was tedious the results were worth the effort since we were able to FINALY reach a stage where we were 99.99% sure that out databse would not need to be changed drastically again.

That done we set about designing the interfaces. Though a few made it to pleasing HTML pages others still remain as not-so-nice scribbles on paper. That said though we were able to clarify much of the logic and discuss how realistic our plans for the interfaces were.

We plan to take a bit of a break next week to prep for midterms but the work continues and we hope to make progress though we will not meet together as is our usual weekly routine


Week Five!

This week's meeting was centered around the project plan and the progress we've made, where we are lagging and how we plan to proceed now that we've hit almost the mid-point of the term.

We were lagging by abut a week and had tp figure out how to speed up.

we decided on cmpleting the following before the next meeting o help things alone: (next meeting - 22/09/2008)

1) Finish up the design of the interface by the next meeting

2) Start designing the interface in HTML

3) Finalise the database structure - specific attention to access levels - which assets are loanable to wh and how this is determined

4) Begin coding the class files