Standing Meeting 4: Breaking Out

Let's start the review of our standing meeting how we always do, what is our progress from last week?

• Create a subversion repository for our project.
• Implement tests to simulate Amber's success story.
• Develop a mock-up of what we expect the user interface might look like.
• Implement Wilbur's success story.
• Make a preliminary structure of the models that we plan to use in our project.

The past week was very successful, as evident from the number of items crossed off our list. I think that we were even more successful than the list indicates however, because we figured out how we can work more effectively as a team. 

Creating a subversion repository for our project turned out to be an easy goal for this week because we were required to do it in class just after we set the goal for ourselves in our standing meeting. After a little confusion about what the project would be named and who would upload it, we managed to have a version stored that everyone was able to download and simulate the success stories that we had already put into place.

Amber's success story made some initial steps toward completion. We have some tests that create a user and check that they are in the database, but we need to do a little bit more research into how to simulate the user navigating to the website and signing in. Zach will be in charge of completing this goal for next week. 

We developed a mock-up of what the user interface might look like, as well as making a rough UML-esque diagram of the classes and method we expect to use in our project. I say UML-esque because I am fairly certain that we didn't follow all of the conventions of the UML. Despite this, I think it was a very useful exercise. In fact, I think that these two activities were probably the most significant achievements of this week. By outlining how we expect the program might be organized, we have a more unified idea of what the project will look like. 

We also implemented Wilbur's success story. You can expect a separate blog post describing that in the near future.

Before our standing meeting this week, we had another group meeting that was very significant. As we have been working on the project, we have just had one major success story that we tried to implement and we had everyone in the group try to work towards that goal independently. We realized that this doesn't work very well because there isn't a lot of motivation to work on the project. Each group member can independently hope that the other group members will accomplish something. From this point forward, we've decided to give each group member a specific task to accomplish so that everyone has an individual goal to work towards. Even though we have these individual goals, we also determined that it will be easier to achieve them if we gather as a project team to work on them. We plan on having regular meeting times scheduled from this point forward.

So with these points in mind, here are our goals for next week:

• Arik:
• Make the website look pretty. All that we have so far is black text displayed on a white background. Arik plans on looking into how Twitter Bootstrap can be integrated into Django.
• Zach:
• Complete tests to simulate Amber's success story. This will be accomplished by checking to make sure the views that are returned are the correct views for a logged in user.
• Karl: 
• Re-organize code so that authentication files are contained in one location. Implement the Light model to the project.
• Entire Group:
• Write tests for the basic model structure that will be implemented for this week.
• Further solidify the UML diagram for the project.

Here's a sneak peak at the UML we started to develop.