Releasing DueDates 2.0

For the last couple of weeks, I have been busy, busy, and busy. I just had a first of a two-part final for Ethnic Studies last week Friday. I heard from an English professor I took couple of semesters back that the last two weeks before finals, instructors cannot schedule quizzes, and finals. So I was thinking if that rule is a school policy then why my Ethnic Studies instructor is is violating it. Still have to take the second part of the final, also there is a five-page essay due on the same day as final.
In my software development class, we been grouped with new classmates, it is now a team of four people. Our project was to improve on our DueDates system, make it as a web application. At the beginning of this project, it can only be run on command prompt/terminal. This project we have to move it from the command prompt to a functional web application. We were able to do just that and added some cool features like filtering the libraries, books, date, and sending it to email. I ran into some problems, one of my classpath variables in Eclipse was pointing to a folder in my Program Files directory when it should’ve been pointing to another folder; forgetting to make a .duedates directory and a duedates.xml file. I was trying to do one of the extra credits, the progress bar extra credit. It was suppose to be a loading pinwheel, but it was a hassle, so I stop working on it.

We had a group meeting almost every day; we were meeting at the Sinclair library at University of Hawaii. Discuss tasks to do, debug, and sometimes space out. It was already, the meeting was not a 30 minute thing, sometime it last five to six hours, and one day we met for 13 hours. I think the group meetings should be spaced out to have four or five hours of meetings instead of one day meeting for 13 hours, the next day meeting for eight hours.
Working on 2.0 release was a lot harder than the previous releases. The previous releases had small requirements, while this latest release has bigger requirements. Plus the fact we had to transition the program from running in a command prompt to running in a web browser. Working with a group of four was a lot different than with two. You have more people working on the system. But working with a group of four people can also cause trouble, like waiting for a piece of program from another member.

The software ICU automatically checks for method coverage, coupling, and other things. It was good to have automated tools to check on the health of the project. Some flaws we my group experienced was some information not showing up on the ICU. Case sensitivity between programmers’ local directories and ICU’s directories. The software ICU did show accurate dad representing individual member participation. Some group members in my group contributed more. One of the problem was a task was assign to one member, another member will start working on the task when the task is not his. Let us say I did a file and was about to upload it to main repository, but another member told me going to do everything in his – that means I wasted those programming time on a useless file.

Time management is a key; everything has to be managed correctly. I do not program at the same level as every other programmer, so I except to have time to finish up my task.

DueDates-Ahinahina 2.0 Project Page: http://code.google.com/p/duedates-ahinahina/
Read the user guide if you want to try out this awesome system: http://code.google.com/p/duedates-ahinahina/wiki/UserGuide