Software Engineering Week 6 - Getting Organized

Weeks Notes

This week was about getting our project up and running, deployed online, and managed with pivotal tracker. One team member took a clear lead in developing the base software for our game. I scoped out what was going on and updated pivotal to see where we could go next. It was a fun week for sure but a bit stressful. My concentration has been on the team project and not really on gannt charts which was another topic for the week.

The content about gannt charts makes me happy to have friends who enjoy project management. I hope to continue to work with people like that and avoid this kind of organization as much as possible. In contrast this pivotal tracker program for Agile projects is really fun. It is nice to set goals for the week and be able to comment on them or move them around with ease. That kind of project management is no problem for me.

Using Pivotal Tracker and figuring out how to compile, debug, and upload the style of Java applications that this class uses has us at a nice start. Things are almost over though so that isn't great. I would like this class to be twice as long and have more fun with our application but that isn't reasonable because of the way this program is setup. The alternative of attending classes in person isn't an option for me either though due to work. So I think the 2nd best, and most expensive option is to just take classes like this a few times so I produce usable products.

Looking ahead

I still haven't been able to get a local JPA application working with MySQL. So that is the big problem for the next week. If my team gets it working on the server that is fine for the project but I need to be able to duplicate anything locally. By being able to run, debug, and modify the program locally I can do a proper code review and provide useful feedback for where our software can head during the next iteration. We also need to do a refactor to get our software away from everything running in the main Java applet. It would be ideal to have the applet handle the requests but have game objects that keep track of game state and let us have a game loop off to the side.