18. MyISERN-1.1

All tasks for this assignment are completed.

Our team's project page is http://code.google.com/p/myisern-1-red/ and the source code can be downloaded here.

Assignment difficulty:
This assignment is more difficult than the first one. One of the problems encountered is how to obtain the collaboration from a given researcher. There were some confusion at the beginning but thanks to the discussion group, we found the clarification by the professor and the problem is solved. Another problem is conflicts during commits. I encountered several unsuccessful commits or updates due to these conflicts and merging the changes are usually quite complicated. Other than these, there are just some minor problems such as if we should use httpunit to validate the links and implementation detail of the method.

Problems encountered with group working:
It has been a very pleasant experience working with my groupmates Jared and Philip. We didn't encounter much problem with group working. However, sometimes it is a bit unclear as of who is working on which part. So one time I was working on a method but when I was almost done, I finally realized that my group mate has already started working a long way on that. So there was some communication problem but other than that, everything was great. I learned a lot from them, especially Jared who is a very good programmer and can always use the minimal lines of codes to achieve the same purpose. He has made our program very concise and easy to read.

Future improvements:
The issues have been a useful tool as it gives a clear outline of what else are yet to be done. I will stick to it in my future projects and I think breaking down the issues into more details might be more efficient and easier to assign work to members.

Overall, this is not a very hard assignment but writing out good methods is another thing. There are many way to implement a method and we sometimes have to switch from return different type. I feel that we could have saved time if we agreed in the beginning what return type to use.

This time, our group practiced pair programming for the first time and I found it very effective. My groupmates can spot my mistakes immediately and they pointed out errors in my Eclipse setting which I never recognized before. I come to appreciate pair programming as I never thought that having someone to watch me program would be so productive. If time allowed, I would love to practice more pair programming.