Standing Meeting 5: Report from the First Split

This week was the first time that our team tried assigning specific tasks to specific people, let's see how we did.

• 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.

Arik's success of integrating twitter bootstrap into our project is a huge confidence boost. It makes our website look like it wasn't built by a fourth grader. Check out our new homepage!

Zach made significant progress towards attaining his goal, but difficulties with the svn repository due to power outages prevented him from being able to complete his goal for the week. 

Karl successfully reorganized the authentication files after quite a bit of difficulty regarding URLs and templates. A light model has been successfully added so that an administrator can add lights to a specific user.

Our lack of tests added for the models to be implemented is due in part to our unfamiliarity with the test first coding practice and also in part due to ambiguous UML diagrams. Since we aren't familiar with how to write tests and exactly what tests to write, it is difficult to complete the task.

There really isn't much excuse for the lack of a further solidified UML, this will be our first priority for next week, hopefully allowing other pieces of the project to be more easily understood and implemented.

These are our goals for next week (or whenever, since we will be going on Spring Break next week):

• Arik:
• Continue to update new pages which we develop to be wrapped in the beautiful environment that is twitter bootstrap.
• Develop the House model for the management app.
• Implement tests for the house model.
• Adding a house to the database.
• Adding a room to the house.
• Removing a room from the house.
• Accessing a house by the user.
• 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.
• Develop the Room model for the management app.
• Implement tests for the room model.
• Adding a room to the database.
• Adding a light to a room.
• Removing a light from the room.
• Karl
• Solidify the UML diagrams for the project. Make these in the Violet UML editor.
• Provide users with a view to see what lights are in their house, not necessarily organized by house or room.
• Allow users to change the state of a light.
• Whole group
• Start programming on the Pis, install all necessary software on the devices so that they can function as our "houses".
• Implement Napoleon's success story.

Napoleon is a registered user of the project HAM website. He wants to see how many lights are currently on in his house. He logs into the website and is immediately greeted by a display which indicates how many lights are controlled by the system in his house and whether those lights are off or on.

Standing Meeting 3: Successes and Failures

As always, we begin our standing meeting by reviewing our goals from last week.

• Create a simple log in page for the website. 
• Create a subversion repository for our project.
• Implement tests to simulate Amber's success story.
• Allow Amber to experience success in her user story.
• Develop a mock-up of what we expect the user interface might look like.

This week, we for the first time experienced both success and failure in our goals. We were able to make a website for our users to log in to, but failed to build the framework on the back end to build our project. I think that we are still going through the stages of becoming familiar with Python and Django, which is keeping us from being able to look to the future of our project. As we become more aware of our tools and what we can do with them, we will be able to visualize how our project might form so that we can begin building that road. To make a very poor analogy, we are chefs who are cooking a dish from a foreign country. We have cooking (programming) skills already, but we are most familiar with the foods (programming language, backend infrastructure) of our own country (Java, C). Until we've had the chance to experiment with the foods from the foreign country (Python, Django, Web application programming, unit tests, subversion repositories) we won't know how to craft them into an expert dish.

With that said, we have to accept that some of our goals might be unattainable with our present skills, but they might be more accessible later on. We added to our incomplete goals a few new goals for this 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.

What's that you say? What is Wilbur's success story? Well I'm glad you asked.

Wilbur is interested in this new craze going around his neighborhood, he's heard something about being able to turn lights on in his house without actually touching the light switch. His friend, Amber, says that he can sign up for an account with the HAM website and request that a technician visits his house to set up the system. Wilbur isn't sure about having a stranger coming into his house to fiddle with electronics, but he figures it couldn't hurt to sign up for a website. He navigates to the HAM website and creates a new account. He then logs in to the website.

While we currently aren't sure if this would be something that we would allow at our company (maybe users would have to install the system before they can have an account on the website) we hope that it will be good to experiment a little bit with the food and learn something in the process.