Standing Meeting 6: Return from Break

Let's see what we accomplished since our last meeting.

• 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.

    Arik has the unfortunate task of always updating the website's common look-and-feel, which is never really completely done, so he will never be able to completely check that item off of his list. Arik did not implement tests for the House model, but some of those tests are contained within other tests because houses are required to add rooms and lights. 

    Zach completed all his objectives except for the test to simulate Amber's success story. Since this is proving to be much too difficult to be worth pursuing, he will be abandoning this task. Karl may try implementing using a different method, but for now it is incomplete. 

    Karl failed yet again to make official looking UML documents for our project. The temptation to continue using our whiteboard picture has proven too strong. Karl also failed to implement the user being able to change the state of the light.

    The whole group was successful in installing software on our Pis that we will need in the future. The end goal is to have the Pis run a Django server, which we have not verified is possible yet, but we believe we have all of the required software.

     We were also able to implement Napoleon's success story. When a user logs in, they are now immediately directed to a page which shows all of the lights that they have in their house, arranged by room. We have yet to add a common look and feel, but it is encouraging to see the application really begin to take shape.

    

We held our standing meeting and determined what our goals for the next couple of weeks should be. 

• Arik:
• Develop the way that we will implement having the database of lights control the Pi.
• Karl:
• Develop the method that will allow users to change the states of lights through the website. These changes must also then be reflected in the database. 
• Zach:
• Assist both Arik and Karl in accomplishing their goals
• Whole Group:
• Implement Snowball's success story.

Snowball wants to log in to the system at his house and turn off a light. He logs in to the website, and turns off the bathroom light. The website shows him that he has accomplished this change.

This week we are trying something new by really focusing on using the Team Programming approach. You probably noticed that Zach does not have a specific goal for this week. He will instead be sitting beside Arik or Karl while they program and providing a second pair of eyes to look at the code. If there is some discreet task that Arik or Karl find, they could also pass this task to Zach to complete for them.

We will now leave you with a screenshot of Napolean's success story, all of the lights in his house, organized by room:

    

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.