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Difference between revisions of "IS480 Team wiki: 2010T2 Fission1: Project Progress Summary"

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====Heng Pei's Reflection====
 
====Heng Pei's Reflection====
  
We are appreciative of the fact that we have weekly meetings with the clients. Hence, we are able to detect early which changes are necessary to best suit the needs of our clients. Looking through many layers of codes and trying to understand them takes quite some time before I can figure which part to add/change code. As the client liasion, I have learnt the discipline to send weekly reminders to the clients as well as team internal meetings. The greatest takeaway so far is to manage the clients' expectations. This is because we are expected to show something new or make changes to existing feature everytime we meet them but we have to juggle with our increasing academic workload as the weeks progress. We are very motivated to make changes according to the feedback of our clients.
+
We are appreciative of the fact that we have weekly meetings with the clients. Hence, we are able to detect early which changes are necessary to best suit the needs of our clients. Looking through many layers of codes and trying to understand them takes quite some time before I can figure which part to add/change code. As the client liasion, I have learnt the discipline to send weekly reminders to the clients as well as team internal meetings. The greatest takeaway so far is to manage the clients' expectations. This is because we are expected to show something new or make changes to existing feature everytime we meet them but we also have to juggle with our increasing academic workload as the weeks progress. We are very motivated to make changes according to the feedback of our clients.
  
 
====Sophie's Reflection====
 
====Sophie's Reflection====

Revision as of 16:36, 15 February 2011

Project Progress Summary

Our project is currently behind slightly behind schedule as we have met some difficulties with customizing and modifying several Drupal modules.
However, we have completed 36/44 (~81%) of our supported use cases and (with the extra time available in Week 8) are on track to complete all core use cases by Week 8. From there on, we would be largely doing themeing (the drupal way of doing UI/layout) and making minor UI changes to our developed functions.

Project Highlights:

Unexpected events that occurred:

  • Team members falling sick
  • Team members too busy with other work
  • Underestimating the time needed to modify existing Drupal modules and integrating with other Drupal modules
    • Instructions available online were helpful with what we needed to do
    • More personal time was allocated to complete the modifications
  • Database corruption
    • Drupal stores most settings via MySQL, and occasionally, we made errors that 'spoilt' the entire website
    • Site has been split into 3 - Dev, Staging, Live.
    • Database backups are now done on a regular basis (Mon, Wed, Fri, Sun)
  • Requirement changes
    • Silverlight & Deep Zoom was found to not be good match for the Video Banner, as there is not enough content to make it look impressive
    • Content for the banner is currently served via a jQuery-based Banner

Project Management

Project Status:

Video Banner

Use Case Status Confidence Level (0-1) Comment
View Slide 100% 1 Completed
Play YouTube Video from within Banner 100% 1 Completed
Pause YouTube Video 100% 1 Completed
Adjust YouTube Video Volume 100% 1 Completed
Play YouTube Video in full screen 100% 1 Completed
Choose Next/Previous Slide 100% 1 Completed
Link out to YouTube Video 100% 1 Completed
Create New Slide 100% 1 Completed
Modify Slides 100% 1 Completed

Current Video Banner has been rejected again. Will be working on a different form of video banner starting on the end of this week.
New Video Banner will be based on the old Highlight Article Drupal module as it is easier to customise a theme for it.

User Mgmt & Site Admin

Use Case Status Confidence Level (0-1) Comment
Register INSG Account 100% 1 Completed
Login via INSG Web Site 100% 1 Completed
Link Facebook Account 100% 0.7 Completed; need to check with existing user account
Link Twitter Account 90% 0.7 Still undergoing testing
Log in via Facebook 100% 0.9 Completed
Log in via Twitter 100% 0.8 Still undergoing testing
Change password 100% 1 Completed
Reset username/password 100% 1 Completed
Prompt to create INSG ac if FB/Twt ac is not linked 70% 0.5 Prompt process is not consistent. Might drop feature or implement our suggested workaround
Admin manually create accounts 100% 1 Completed
Edit account types (User to Admin) 100% 1 Completed
View own Profile Page 0% 1 In progress
View other user's Profile Page 0% 1 In progress
View personal posts 0% 1 In progress
View other user's posts 0% 1 In progress
View personal badges 0% 1 In progress
View other user's badges 0% 1 In progress
Ban/Mute Users 100% 1 Completed
Delete Users 100% 1 Completed

Wall

Use Case Status Confidence Level (0-1) Comment
View Content 100% 1 Completed
Create Text Post 100% 1 Completed
Create Pic Post 100% 1 Completed
Create URL Link Post 100% 1 Completed
Rate Posts - Like 100% 1 Completed
Delete Posts 100% 1 Completed
Edit Posts 100% 1 Completed
Share Posts to FB/Twitter 95% 1 Sharing currently doesn't give a pop-up window. Will fix by next iteration
Report Offensive Posts 100% 1 Completed

Badges

Use Case Status Confidence Level (0-1) Comment
Add New Custom Badge 100% 1 Completed
Edit/Delete Custom Badge 100% 1 Completed
Manually Assign Custom Badge to users 100% 1 Completed
Earn Behavioral Badges through Post & Comment Count 90% 1 In progress
View Other Users' Badges 30% 1 In progress
View Badge List 0% 1 In progress
View Others with same badge 0% 1 In progress
View Badges not earned in the same category 0% 1 In progress


Project Schedule (Plan Vs Actual):

Compare the project plan during acceptance with the actual work done at this point. Briefly describe a summary here. Everything went as plan, everything has changed and the team is working on a new project with new sponsors or the supervisor is missing. A good source for this section comes from the project weekly report.

Provide a comparison of the plan and actual schedule. Has the project scope expanded or reduced? You can use the table below or your own gantt charts.

Things to know:

  • We are able to work on separate functions for our project (see critical path below)
  • Completion Date = Deployed Date
F1 Critical Path

Iteration 1

Iteration 1 Proposed vs Actual

Iteration 2

Iteration 2 Proposed vs Actual


Project Metrics:

Summary of analysis for the metrics collected. You may refer to another page for the details about the metrics and how it is collected.


Project Risks:

Update the proposal assumptions and risks. Describe what you learn from the risk update and mitigation steps taken.

Risk Probability Impact Level Mitigation
Data in DB gets corrupted when one of us makes a deployment error Med Low C
  1. Regular DB backup maintained by Sophie, dump files are added to SVN
  2. Site divided into 3 - Dev, Staging & Live - to prevent future total corruptions
  3. Members made aware of problem, will make backups before installing new functions
Not achieving 100% consistency with FB & Twt Alternate Sign In High Low B
  1. Workaround situation prepared
  2. Client briefed on details of workaround (agree-able to our solution)
  3. Estimate costs for other options
Academic commitments interfering with development process Med Med B
  1. FYP-only day instituted
  2. Arrange schedule to complete heavily-part of FYP before Week 8
Hitting a Drupal problem we cannot fix Low High B
  1. Identified channels (Drupal IRC, Drupal forums, module forums) where we can ask for help
  2. Had already spent some time to scope out the capabilities of the modules used
Change of Project Requirements Low Med C
  1. Client is clear with what they want - functionality-wise
  2. Client is clear with our capabilities and what we can achieve
Deployment issues when migrating from Apache to IIS Servers Med High A
  1. Have done sufficient research on the procedures and changes needed to be made
  2. Drupal deployment on IIS has been well documented online
  3. Had several simulations of Drupal deployment on IIS



Technical Complexity:

Describe and list the technical complexity of your project in order of highest complexity first. For example, deploying on iPhone using Objective-C, customizing Drupal with own database, quick search for shortest flight path, database structure, etc.


Quality of product

Provide more details about the quality of your work. For example, you designed a flexible configurable system using XML.config files, uses Strategy Design Pattern to allow plugging in different strategy, implement a regular expression parser to map a flexible formula editor, etc.

Intermediate Deliverables:

There should be some evidence of work in progress.

Stage Specification Modules
Project Management Minutes

Client Meeting Minutes

Supervisor Meeting Minutes

Team Meeting Minutes

Bugs Bug metrics
Schedule Schedule metrics
Requirements Functional Requirements [link_here insert document here]
Analysis Use case [link_here insert use case image here]
Screen Shots
Design UI Design
Testing UAT test plan instructions


Deployment:

Currently, the Dev-version of our site is hosted at http://202.161.45.165/insg/dev/.
Our Staging and Live sites are not ready for access or testing as our code has not reached a level of maturity stable enough for deployments on those sites.

To access the non-admin features of our project, the following account details could be used:
Username: SampleUser
Password: SamplePassword

Testing:

Over the course of our project, we would be conducting a minimum of 3 UAT sessions:

  1. Half-time UAT Session
  2. End Development UAT Session
  3. Hand-over UAT Session

Half-time UAT Session

We currently split our tester audience into 2 groups - Full System Testers & UI Testers - for our half-time UAT Session.

Full System Testers

  • Consist of client users (3) & other FYP friends (6)
  • Test both User & Admin functions and use cases

UI Testers

  • Currently consist of 9 completed tests
  • Purpose is to get feedback on the general feel and ease-of-use for users

Feedback

  • to be filled in soon

Describe the testing done on your system. For example, the number of UAT, tester profile, test cases, survey results, issue tracker, bug reports, etc.


Reflection

In this section, describe what have the team learn? Be brief. Sometimes, the client writes a report to feedback on the system; this sponsor report can be included or linked from here.

Team Reflection:

Any training and lesson learn? What are the take-away so far? It would be very convincing if the knowledge is share at the wiki knowledge base and linked here.


Individual Reflection:

Gabriel's Reflection

I've always been a control freak; there are times that I control group discussions, I control what and how people contribute, sometimes I even go down to the code level and ask for changes to make it more "efficient" or "correct". Unfortunately, for FYP, I can't do that, mainly because there isn't enough time for stick my nose in everything.

Hence, my greatest lesson, and also difficulty, for FYP is to 'let go' and trust the quality of my group mates work and their personal commitment into a project. I guess, beyond gaining some experience with project management and with Drupal, this FYP is an opportunity for me to manage and learn how to become less of a control freak. Which is not easy (in fact, it's bloody difficult!).

Seow Theng's Reflection

So far, there is good team cooperation and everyone is working on assigned task diligently. I feel that the major difficulty which I encountered during the development phase is trying to understand the codes of existing drupal modules so as to find out where I could begin the modification as well as how the module actually work. I need to find out which files are modifiable and which is not. I would say that understanding other's people codes and then make modification is not easy.

The other major difficulty which I encountered is theming the entire site. I'm neither a very creative nor expert in designing the entire site's look and feel. I have provided several design such as site design, logo design, and trademark design to client but until now they did not give me a direct answer as to what color they preferred for the site as well as which design they like best for the site. Most of the time, they are giving me advise as to which is a good website to "copy" their design and layout.I find it hard to deliver a site layout and design which will make them happy. I start to think that this entire project somehow got shifted to more designing then technical which I feel it is not right.

Drupal theming is also not as easy as you think because they are not like normal HTML page which you could hard-code stuffs. For Drupal theming, I need to understand the codes which aligned each elements in a page and the correct region which will be displaying the blocks. I also need to find out how to create regions as well as custom pages using PHP.

Heng Pei's Reflection

We are appreciative of the fact that we have weekly meetings with the clients. Hence, we are able to detect early which changes are necessary to best suit the needs of our clients. Looking through many layers of codes and trying to understand them takes quite some time before I can figure which part to add/change code. As the client liasion, I have learnt the discipline to send weekly reminders to the clients as well as team internal meetings. The greatest takeaway so far is to manage the clients' expectations. This is because we are expected to show something new or make changes to existing feature everytime we meet them but we also have to juggle with our increasing academic workload as the weeks progress. We are very motivated to make changes according to the feedback of our clients.

Sophie's Reflection

From the beginning, I have had quite a lot of difficulties with setting up the application and catching up with other people's progress. I greatly appreciate the guidance from my teammates as well as the encouragement from the supervisor and clients. Currently, I have acquired some important knowledge of the Drupal modules, especially those related to the Badge system. The most difficult thing that I am encountering right now is the user interface, on how they will view the badges that they have earned, and other users' badges within the homepage and the user profile page.

But I have a strong belief that I will be able to do it. I think as long as we put more effort and have a good time management skill, we will be able to finish the project to the best quality. About our team, we are not as close as I expected. We are getting busier and busier with our academic workload and worries for the internships, career, money. However, during our meetings, we are still having fun such as asking PM to be our waiter (buying lunch for everyone), making fun of PM's long hair ^^ errr... while integrating our coding parts.

Dit Ching's Reflection

This project allows me to understand a little bit more of the modular concept behind drupal powered sites. Although it is supposedly to make content manager/developer’s life easier, it does take a lot of time to learn and build as well. To unlearn and be open to re-learning is an extremely important factor as its framework is totally different from anything else that we have ever learnt before; and the modules are developed by thousands of other drupal developers around the world. There are a lot of customisations to be made for this project and to run through that thousands of codes / files developed by unknown people would really be time-consuming and overwhelming but I believe it will be a rewarding experience. Project aside, initially the team was reluctant to take any sort of risk (to integrate codes and work together from the same repository) and worked on the functions in silos instead. It turned out that we were not functioning as efficient as we wanted to. Instilling trust, clear communication, and developing interdependency are the fundamental keys to productive teamwork. Without any of these, the team will all fall apart -- which is of course, will not happen to Fission1.