Standing Meeting 5/6/14

Our standing meeting felt very good this week, mainly because we were able to accomplish many of our goals:

Update the user's light control page

Implement Schedule 

Add button to turn on/off all lights within a room

Well, maybe we didn't accomplish as many goals as we thought. But we made good progress towards each of them. Arik did successfully revise the interface for changing the state of lights, as you can see from his earlier blog post. Karl's work with implementing a schedule led to some revisions to the initial design. With Zach's assistance, the schedule was revised to contain a list of a new class called Rules so that multiple on and off times can be scheduled through the week. Our system can recognize whether or not a schedule should be on at a given time, but we haven't yet put in the functionality to have the houses (Raspberry Pis) recognize this change. We weren't able to put an interface in for turning on or off the lights in a room, but we did some work on the backend to possibly make this task easier in the future.

Moving forward we have several more goals.

Add button to turn on/off all lights within a room. - Arik

Make the stats tab a relevant tab, rather than just displaying dummy data. - Karl

Finish implementing the schedule, and put into effect Lester's success story. - Zach

Lester's user story: Lester is going on vacation to Kathmandu he is in a rush to get through the airport, but he wants to make sure that his house is set to run as he wants it while he is gone. He calls the company and tells a technician to set his house to run on a schedule, turning lights on and off every 5 minutes in order to make it seem like he is still in the house. The technician follows through with this and Lester's neighbors call his house several times because they are confused why the lights are turning on and off so often.

That's all we have for this week's standing meeting.

Standing Meeting 4/29/14

With the big rush towards Scholar's Day and the much needed respite after the event, we postponed our previous standing meeting almost a week later than it should have been. Then, in an effort to get things back on a regular schedule, we still had our regular standing meeting on Tuesday, even though we just had our previous standing meeting the night before. This resulted in a meeting without much to talk about. We did plan out our meeting times for the week ahead, because we always find that it is easier to work on the project with others around rather than by ourselves. We have already held our meeting on Wednesday night and plan to have another meeting on Sunday evening.

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 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.

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.

Standing Meeting 2: Get Set.

Our second standing meeting started with good news! We went over our list of goals from last week:

• Install Python3 on the server
• Setup a MySQL database for the Django framework to access
• Create a website which our potential users could access*

The last item has an asterisk because the "website" that the users can access is nothing more than a page that notifies that a web server is running, but there is no content on the site.

We then proceeded to set goals for next week. This included developing a user story which we plan to implement. This is our first user story:

Amber wants to log in to manage to our web service to manage her home. She navigates to the log in page, inputs her credentials, and is greeted by a welcome page.

Here is what we decided on.

• 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.

In order to reach these goals, we will each independently walk through the Django tutorial so that we are at some level familiar with the framework that we are using. We plan on completing this by the start of the weekend so that we can work on actually building our website over the weekend and implementing our user success story. 

Standing Meeting 1: Initializing...

Hot dogs.

That was what was in front of us as we had our first standing meeting for Project HAM. We had previously decided that we would have our standing meeting over dinner, which was an interesting experience to say the least. Thankfully corndogs were being served for dinner, so it made standing and eating relatively easy.

We made a list of things that we wanted to accomplish before the week's end. This is what it included:

• Install Python3 on the server
• Setup a MySQL database for the django framework to access
• Create a website which our potential users could access

We set up another meeting for Wednesday evening where we will make our first steps toward these goals. Arik is the only one in our group who has experience with databases, so setting up the MySQL database will probably be the main topic of Wednesday's meeting. 

We plan on using Django with the MySQL database, which will be a new interface for all of the members of our group. Karl found this resource which might come in handy as we reach that point in our project.

Stay tuned for more info on what exactly Project HAM is and what progress we are making towards our goals.

-Team PorkPI