MyISERN 2.0 Review - Team Yellow

Project Reviewed:

MyISERN-2-Yellow Distribution
MyISERN-2-Yellow Homepage

1. Installation Review

I was able to download the system as a distribution .zip file. However, I could not unzip the zip file using the Windows unzip tool (it said there was nothing to extract). After consulting with my group members, I was advised to use Winrar instead. Once I was able to extract the files, I began the process of installing the system. This turned out to be far more difficult than one would like.

The project uses XAMPP which I guess is some kind of package that includes popular php tools such as Apache, MySQL, and PEAR (along with PHP). After some minor tweaking I was able to get XAMPP working.

Symfony turned out to be much more difficult to work with than XAMPP. It required a variety of components to make it run and the documentation provided by Team Yellow doesn't really explain how to do that. I am not sure if the components are supposed to inherently work after installing XAMPP, but once I got XAMPP to work I could not figure out how to make them work. After looking at other documentation online, and they all seemed to geared more toward a Unix environment rather than Windows so they weren't that helpful. Even the file for Symfony is archived in a .tgz which is more geared towards a Unix environment. So after working on it for like an hour, I could not get Symfony to work.

Here are the results from invoking the following ant tasks:

Due to installation issues I was unable to run the equivalent php tasks on the system.

2. Code format and conventions review

Due to the use of the new language PHP, I am unfamiliar with what the code format and conventions should be.

3. Test case review

Black Box Perspective

Due to installation issues I was unable to look at the black box testing. Although I must admit, I was interested in seeing how you would conduct black box testing on PHP.

White Box Perspective

Once again, due to installation issues, white box testing could not be evaluated.

Break da buggah

Due to installation issues tests could not be broken.

4. User Interface review

I was unable to look at the user interface because of the installation issues.

5. Summary and Lessons Learned

This project review really taught me the value of having good documentation and explanation in wiki pages. Up till this point, everyone had pretty much been using the same languages, tools, and environment so installation was never a problem. When a team decides to migrate to a new language, tools, and environment, they must make sure that their documentation is excellent otherwise other people who have no experience working with their project components will not even be able to run the system, let alone review it.