21.MyISERN-1.2

Milestone 1.2.1022

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What was difficult about this assignment?
The difficult part of this assignment was having to complete all the assigned tasks. This time there was much more to do than simply code, test, and fix. We also had to write use cases and put together a PowerPoint presentation.

Another difficult aspect of this assignment was testing. I found out that it was very difficult to test command line usage in JUnit tests because the I kept running out of memory when testing the input task for milestone 1.2.1022. I was testing the input capability by reading in input from a text file to simulate user input. That strategy seemed to work pretty well, but I guess it takes up a large amount of memory to do that so I kept running out of memory. Because of this, I was unable to fully test the input class, and as a result, both black and white box testing suffered.

Also the validate XML ant task turned out to be very difficult to satisfy. The collaboration years, it turns out (at least the way we handled them), does not get written to the XML file in a valid manner (when there are no collaboration years). However, the system still runs and everything is ok on the system side, but I guess the XML file is not up to par. Right now the only I can see to fix it is to put in a bogus value like 1000 for null collaboration years and then disregard this value when reading the data into the system. However, I refrained from doing something like that because then XML data by itself is not valid according to system specifications.

What problems were encountered in organizing the group and carrying out the work?
We divided up the input task into 3 issues, one for collaboration, organization, and researcher. Then everybody tried to help everyone else to do the use cases and the PowerPoint. This turned out to be a not very efficient way of tackling this milestone. That is because the 3 issues are basically the same issue, with a large amount of copying and pasting and then modification to fit each type. Also, because people were not assigned smaller tasks that they could finish on their own, everyone had to help everyone else out when they ran into problems and we spent a lot of time helping each other instead of working on what we were assigned.

Were all of the assigned tasks completed? If not, why not?
All of the tasks were completed successfully.

What will you do differently during the next Milestone to improve the process and the product of your efforts?
For the next Milestone, I will create smaller tasks for each person to work on. That way the person assigned that task should be able to complete them on their own or with minimal help from another group member.